#I suppose the watsonian explanation

[fanfoolishness]

Thank goodness Lucanis got possessed by a demon that already matched his color scheme. The purple wings and eyes for the Demon of Vyrantium? I bet half the Crows who saw him fight Illario with Spite forgot to be scared because he just looked so damn stylish

But can you imagine if he got possessed by Rage? Orange and red glowing everywhere? For an Antivan Crow in blue leathers? He’d be a clown. Utter disgrace

[nostalgia-tblr]

wait...

wait...

if alligator loki's nexus event was eating the wrong cat, does that imply that all the other, non-alligator, lokis ate the right cat? :O

[iamawrittensentence]

i really appreciate when artists keep the vibe that Taylor is a little Unnearving! especially with the exaggerated wide mouth, Taylor's wide mouth is a really core feature for her imo! also I love how she looks unhinged but it's probably at least 73% the fact that she's not wearing her glasses lmfaooo

i love u taylor

[ennn]

Re: “Rio's goal is to kill Agatha so she can be with her forever”

My brother in Christ, if Rio's ultimate goal this series was to kill Agatha we wouldn't have gotten past the first episode.

Okay okay, I get how it can be confusing because Rio literally says she wants to see Agatha dead in episode one and tells Agatha she'll let the Salem Seven (who do want Agatha dead) know where she is.

But it is noteworthy that Rio tells Agatha what she is going to do and when the Salem Seven are expected to arrive. Rio is usually surprisingly fair in how she deals with Agatha.

Rio has always met Agatha at her power level

In episode one, even assuming Agatha was protected by Wanda's spell and Rio couldn't harm her there, once it was broken Rio went "full analog" – to quote Hahn – with her knife, the only magic she used being the wind blasts.

Guys, that's not a serious murder attempt, that's foreplay to them. Violent, bloody, sexy foreplay.

Also Rio has healing powers. That's a thing they have very clearly shown.

To be clear, my read is that Rio can't actually kill anyone before their time ("You can't kill me, it's not allowed") just hurt them really really badly until they maybe choose to die ("I can make you wish you were dead"). Which you could argue equals killing I suppose, just slower.

But this is Agatha Harkness: all she really needs to survive is a bit of time to scheme and manipulate and do her usual girlbossing, gatekeeping, and gaslighting – and I think Rio also knows this. Agatha keeps surprising her, for better and worse.

Yes, Rio gets BIG MAD in episode 8 because Agatha says possibly The Worst Thing to her but the first part of their confrontation is technically physical torture, not murder attempts.

I know it sounds like I'm splitting hairs here but my point is that having Agatha dead isn't Rio's ultimate #1 goal. It's not so clean and easy.

There's something to be said about how the wounds Rio inflicts speak to how Rio sees herself hurt by Agatha emotionally in the relationship i.e. death by a thousand cuts, the severing of her Achilles tendon.

There’s probably something also be said about the relationship a being like Rio has with physical pain. Trees feel pain. Everything living does. Rio mocks Agatha for dulling herself to it using dark magic.

But I digress.

Anyway, note: it's only after Agatha gets magic back that Rio starts throwing magic blasts – and even then she seems to be holding back.

These two are possibly the worst two witches to fight each other directly like this because Agatha can't absorb Rio's magic or she'll die. She has to actively block or avoid all hits. And I bet this isn't something Agatha is used to dealing with considering she had no issues taking Wanda's magic.

And Rio is aware of this because she’s just lobbing quick little green blasts Agatha's way. It's not a torrent of magic like what Agatha is gleefully unleashing.

It's also the Watsonian (in-universe) explanation as to why this fight is so short. Because you literally can't straight up fight Death. Rio is a hard counter to Agatha's special siphoning ability just like how Agatha was a hard counter to Wanda's magic (insert your scissors-paper-stone visual of choice).

Rio doesn't want Agatha dead, she wants Agatha to want her

It's clear that Rio is grieving when Agatha dies. This isn't the outcome she wants. They're also both crying during the kiss it's great.

Rio wants what Agatha specifically tries to deny in the deal Agatha proposes: she wants to keep pursuing Agatha, to keep seeing her, provoking her, to be shocked and surprised by her. To keep loving her but also, to keep hurting her.

Because Agatha also hurts her right back. And Agatha knows she has Rio constantly on the emotional backfoot, that Rio – despite centuries of hatred thrown her way – still humours her more often than not and what levers to push.

I don't think this can happen with Agatha dead and gone.

To be fair, we don't know what the rules are in this world's afterlife. The only insight we get into Rio's job is her scene with Alice and that still leaves a lot of things unanswered: Does Rio just escort souls to a destination or does she have more control beyond that, like a domain? Can souls refuse to go with Rio? How do ghosts happen?

I had previously assumed Rio needed to allow it but Schaeffer says that her vision in that moment has Agatha's using an evolved form of the power to take Rio's magic by touch.

And with that, it's telling that it's Agatha who ultimately ensures that she dies (with the "calculated risk" of becoming a ghost), siphoning Rio's death magic energy.

Agatha embraces death, embraces Rio, but she also doesn't – Rio's clever witch got away again.

[ckret2]

Wait okay in The Book of Bill, Bill’s putting in all these pages himself while he’s in the theraprism, right? So… how could he have gotten his hands on the lost journal pages in there? I’ve seen people point out certain inconsistencies in them (Ford being drawn with a hair streak even though it’s supposed to take place earlier, etc.) What are your thoughts?

My theory is that either somehow he got his hands on the pages before his incarceration and stowed them in TBOB; or TBOB itself, being a magical book that can regenerate & "corrupt" other books & teleport around when you aren't looking, got hold of the journal and ripped the pages out itself.

I've seen all the "but Ford's drawn wrong" "but Ford never does Bill's handwriting like that" "but why weren't these pages present in the J3 we read after it was magically fully repaired" "but Ford was supposed to meet Bill in J2" chatter suggesting that maybe the pages aren't legit, and honestly? I think the explanation for all of these issues is "Alex last worked on J3 like eight years before TBOB and he & the artists were more concerned with beefing up Ford's relationships with Bill and Fiddleford than they were with little details like that." This is a situation where the doylist explanation is much simpler and a lot more likely than a watsonian complicated forgery scheme.

So that's my serious "what I think happened in canon" explanation for all that.

Separately, my own headcanon:

Personally I've theorized for ages that the journals weren't written chronologically (because if Ford fully filled J1 and J2 before starting J3, why did he just so happen to have blank two-page spreads in J1 & J2 on which he could write the portal blueprints, and why did Stan find SOME portal instructions in J1?), so my own headcanon is that the J3 we've read is indeed complete with all pages, and these pages are actually taken out of Journal 2. There might even be a few pages out of J1. Bill advertised them as "missing Journal 3 pages" because he knew The Reader Of TBOB is a GF fan who has more of an emotional connection to J3 than 1 and 2. The idea that he was filling the journals non-chronologically explains why these pages also cover events that happened during J3; which journal Ford was writing in on any day randomly bounced between journals.

This isn't an "I think this might have been the authorial intent" headcanon, this is an "I think the author accidentally introduced some inconsistencies so this is how I'm privately justifying them" headcanon.

[stillness-in-green]

why do you think Deku never tried to talk to Shigaraki? doylist reason is obvious but what's the watsonian reason?

Honestly, this one’s pretty tricky to answer.  It’s very hard to get myself into the headspace of Deku (and the people in his own headspace!)—mainly because I get extremely uncharitable, extremely quickly.  Mainly about Horikoshi, yes, but that does extend to Deku, too, as well as the broader world he lives in.

The brain goes immediately to answers like, “His world is so incredibly slanted towards retributive models of justice that the fact that he even thinks about wanting to know Shigaraki’s motivations makes him a candidate for mad sainthood to the people around him.  The fact that he doesn’t follow that impulse through all the way to actually asking is immaterial; while Villains have to be punished for their actions, for Heroes, it’s the thought that counts.”

See how I’m already drifting back towards meta-narrative analysis at the end there?  Deku brings a lot of that out in me, especially from Villain Hunt onwards.  Like the wooden doll he’s named for, he comes off to me as a vessel for the plot to happen through more than he does a consistently written, well-thought-out character.  Trying to think of him through a purely Watsonian lens—no refences made at all, period, to what I think the story was trying to express or what Horikoshi’s intentions towards that story were—I almost immediately jump the tracks into territory that is all but certainly incompatible with what I was “supposed” to take away from MHA as a story.

But, you did ask, so I’ll follow the thought experiment through.  If I were to try and set down to paper an explanation for Deku’s actions from a purely in-universe stance—say, for writing canon compliant post-series fanfic—what would be my explanation?

(Hit the jump.)

Right off the bat, from a cultural perspective, I think Deku is afraid that if he tries to make excuses for Shigaraki, it would be disrespectful to Shigaraki’s victims.  That’s why you get the heroic characters constant harping on about how they can’t forgive the Villains, even though, as adjuncts to the police, “forgiveness” is utterly immaterial to them doing their jobs.  Too much sympathy for criminals, in some peoples’ eyes, becomes indicative of a lack of proper regard for the victims of crime; this is very much a dynamic in play in Japan’s legal system.[1]  Ochaco initially has the same impulse, where she’s terrified that even thinking about Toga Himiko’s human circumstances puts her in danger of forgetting the suffering Toga and the League brought about.

1: That’s a meta consideration, yes, but one that I think the target audience would understand to be implicit in the canon as written, so I’m treating it as a Watsonian detail.

Ochaco and Deku commiserate and ultimately encourage each other to embrace their desire to understand their respective Villains, which leads to Ochaco talking to Toga at some length!  Ochaco must do this because asking Toga these questions if the only way she has to reach that understanding.  Deku does not have to ask, however, because he has a cheatmode to fall back on: the mindscape shared between All For One and One For All.  If Deku thinks too much open communication with Villains risks dishonoring Shigaraki’s victims, well, he doesn’t have to openly communicate.  He doesn’t have to talk to Shigaraki the person at all.  He just has to find that crying little boy in the mindscape again.

I also think it’s notable that Deku very much does stop talking about wanting to save Shigaraki after he talks to Gran Torino.  From that point on, everything he says about Shigaraki becomes about wanting to understand him instead.  Coupled with the idea that he insists upon not forgiving Shigaraki, I get the sense that what Deku wants is not to help Shigaraki at all, but rather to simply bear witness to his truth.  And even that much feels self-serving to me—as if Deku doesn’t care so much that Shigaraki is in pain, but rather that Shigaraki might have a point, that Shigaraki’s pain might be valid.  Shigaraki having a valid point would destabilize everything Deku believes about Heroes and Hero Society, and Deku has, by that point, seen enough that he’s too upright to look away, to “sweep things back under the rug,” so he has to find out Shigaraki’s story to judge it for himself.

The fact that he feels he has the right to judge Shigaraki’s story speaks to the arrogance of Heroes—the same arrogance that leads them to declare their lack of forgiveness as if it’s in some way relevant to doing the job in front of them—as well as a deeply rooted defensiveness: that they must have, and be perceived as having, the moral high ground over those evil Villains.  I think, for example, of the Flamin’ Sidekickers and their cringingly awkward self-justifications to Dabi about their continued association with Todoroki Enji.  Their reasoning has zero bearing on either Dabi’s pain or their own heroic responsibilities to assist in the arrest of a known murderer/terrorist/arsonist, but they feel the need to spell that reasoning out to the child abuse victim/volatile Villain anyway, seemingly for no in-character reason save to rationalize the deep discomfort that Dabi’s video accusations provoked in them.

Heroes must be seen as morally just—this is the whole basis for the authority they’ve been granted to wield their powers against other people.  Best Jeanist talks about this idea explicitly, as does Police Chief Tsuragamae.  Far more damningly, it’s what led to the HPSC using agents like Lady Nagant and Hawks to quietly dispose of anyone that would present a threat to the public image of Heroes and, by extension, the fragile peace that rests on that public image.

Heroes must be pure and righteous, and Deku is just as apt to believe that as any other Hero—maybe even more apt, given that he’s also had All Might leaning on him about the bearer of One For All being the Pillar and the Symbol of Peace.  All this baggage winds up conflicting, however, with the horror and reflexive need to help Deku feels upon seeing the small, crying child within Shigaraki.

Saving small crying children is the absolute, innermost core of Deku’s personal framing of Heroism—seriously, he says this nearly word-for-word in Chapter 1!—and so, like Shouji says of the heteromorph riot, it isn’t something he can ignore and still call himself a Hero.  He’s unprepared for that personal brand of Heroism to conflict with the demands of professional Heroism, because he never expected to face someone who was both Evil Villain and Crying Child at the same time.  This is what he wrestles with over the course of his time away from UA and why, ultimately, he decides to use the mindscape as a way of resolving the conflict.

(Note again that I'm talking about my fanfic explanation here. Deku's reasoning is much murkier in the canon because of the canon's late turn towards locking us hard out of Deku's personal feelings and thoughts when they're about anything more complex than chain OFA combo moves.)

Remember that Deku begins the Villain Hunt Arc with a tentative desire to “understand Villains” so that he can perhaps use that understanding to avert or at least deescalate conflicts with them—and then the very first Villain he falteringly tries to understand is fucking Muscular, who shuts him down cold.  Deku never tries that hard[2] to understand a Villain again—Lady Nagant dumps her backstory on him with very little prompting from him, he has nothing but ultimatums for Overhaul, he doesn’t seem to ask any of AFO’s other minions any personal questions whatsoever, and with Shigaraki, he goes straight to the mindscape instead of even attempting a dialogue.

2: Insomuch as you could call asking three invasive, judgy questions in the middle of combat and then throwing in the towel “trying hard”.

My take is that Muscular scared him off of trying to verbally uncover the backstories of Villains—even though Shigaraki is ready to all but hand the first Hero to ask an illustrated history of his grievances with Hero Society, Deku can’t trust that anything Shigaraki tells him will be the unvarnished truth.  Unlike Shouto, he has no one to corroborate the truth with, but unlike Uraraka, he doesn’t just have to make the best of it, either.  He can instead utilize the mindscape, an approach that sidesteps all of the issues that a spoken dialogue would entail:

Getting Shigaraki’s truth via the mindscape means he can trust the answers he gets, rather than having to filter those answers through Shigaraki’s warped worldview.  This allows him to honestly evaluate Shigaraki’s perspective, gauging whether Shigaraki has a real point that Deku has any responsibility to address, some injustice that needs to be corrected independently of Shigaraki being held accountable for his crimes.    

Having decided that—for reasons of justice, All Might’s Pillar mentality, and his own peace of mind—he has to know Shigaraki’s truth, Deku comes to feel self-righteously entitled to that truth.  Thus, even though Shigaraki always seemed perfectly willing to share his thoughts in their previous encounters, Deku can’t take the chance that he’ll change his mind and rebuff Deku like Muscular did.  Using the mindscape takes that agency away from Shigaraki, rendering his willingness to share moot.    

No one other than people with access to the shared mindscape can perceive the interactions happening within it.  This means that, no matter what Deku learns or how he reacts to it in the moment, he doesn’t risk being seen as disrespecting Shigaraki’s victims by prioritizing the feelings and perspective of a vicious terrorist.    

Finally, on a tactical note, the encounter Deku has with Shigaraki in the mindscape during the Jakku battle seems to happen nigh instantaneously.  If he can get his answers at the speed of thought, that means he doesn’t have to specifically draw out his battle with Shigaraki until he’s resolved things to his personal satisfaction.  This is ideal, since Shigaraki presents an incredibly dangerous threat to everything and everyone around him, and Deku’s Hero education has repeatedly emphasized the importance of ending battles quickly.

There's just one problem with all this: Deku is assuming access to Shigaraki’s mind.  And why wouldn’t he?  He got in there without even trying last time, after all!  I assume that’s also why he rolls up to the battle with zero plans of any kind: he doesn’t understand how the mechanics of the shared mindscape work and none of the prior bearers can advise him because it’s a brand-new phenomenon for him as the ninth bearer, so they’re just as clueless about it as he is. 

Lacking that knowledge, he opts to simply take it on faith that he’ll be able to access that mental space again, find the crying child in it, and uncover enough about Shigaraki’s history to render his own judgement of it.  He's the Deku who does his best, after all; if it doesn't work, at least he'll know he tried. The good faith attempt, however it turns out, will allow him to satisfy his own sense of justice while not interfering with whatever temporal justice the adult Heroes are planning for Shigaraki—to which Deku fully believes he must be subjected as punishment for his crimes!—be it arrest or an execution broadcast to the entire world.

Unfortunately for Deku, thanks to his being waylaid by Toga, he turns up late to the battle only to find Shigaraki’s psyche sealed up tighter than an All Might-themed wall safe.  Then, since he never had any kind of plan for talking to Shigaraki, and his own ability to plan things is strictly limited to combining quirk abilities on the fly, he has to wing it until Kudou is able to come up with a plan for him.  Naturally, because Kudou is Kudou, and Heroes’ solutions are tailored to Heroes’ strengths, this involves violent psychic assault.  And why not?  It’s not like Deku believes Shigaraki deserves the mercy of a gentler approach.  Just think of all those people he hurt!

Now, is this all heckin’ uncharitable?  Does it paint Deku as well-intended but blindly self-righteous and ethically timid? Oh, for sure.  And I do think there was a point at which Deku wanted to save Shigaraki in a truer sense—indeed, he’s quite plain-spoken about it in the OFA Mental Conference in the aftermath of the first war!  However, it’s absolutely within his established characterization to run into things that make him uneasy and take the first out an authority figure offers him that spares him the work of demolishing and rebuilding his entire world view.  Look no further than the aftermath of the mall scene. You can draw a straight line from Deku taking Tsukauchi's out (that Shigaraki is just a sore loser) to him also taking Gran's (that killing Shigaraki could be a way of saving him).

That’s the mentality I would lean on to explain Deku’s anemic efforts to truly save Shigaraki in the end: an inherent desire to help people that has been hamstrung by a learned dehumanization of Villains, a repeated emphasis on swift, unthinking action as a Heroic virtue, a culture that regards sympathy for those involved in a crime as a zero sum game, and, last but not least, a psychological complex about the basic nature of Heroism rooted in his fraught childhood.

Deku says he’ll “never forget” Shigaraki. If it were me writing the sequel, “never forgetting” would look an awful lot like, “Following a particularly frustrating day of the Pro Hero grind, Midoriya Izuku opens his eyes at 4AM one cold winter night in his early-40s with the horrible, inescapable realization that what he did as a teenager to a deeply victimized young man barely older than he was himself back then was fucked up in ways he can never repair or take back.  And further that now, not only is he going to have to spend the rest of his life trying to make up for that act, it’s going to be much, much harder than it would have been back then, specifically because he did what he did back then and let the world get away with calling it heroism.”

Thanks for the ask, anon! I hope you find the answer interesting and at least somewhat believable, for all that it certainly isn't tonally in-line with the story's portrayal of its much-lauded protagonist.

   

(P.S. On top of convincing both All Might and Deku to not pursue saving Shigaraki in any concrete sense, Gran Torino also takes partial credit for Nana's decision to abandon Kotarou. Torino Sorahiko might actually be the all-time world champion of convincing OFA bearers that preserving One For All is worth abandoning children to their grim fates. Give him a hand, everyone. What a great and admirable Hero who absolutely deserved to survive all the way to the end of the story and who definitely is not a symbol of all the most jaded and cynical priorities of the old order.)

[armandofnowhere]

this is probably the only reasonable watsonian explanation as to why armand refers to the prayer by the uzbek name instead of the arabic one. otherwise, i’d think it’s just a book easter egg as armand-andrei was captured by tatars from old kyiv in that version. tatars are of central asian turkic origin similar to uzbeks.

p.s. thumbs up to daniel for clocking it was at least a turkic language armand was speaking, i.e., “is it kazakh?” i suppose his years in journalism has sent him to places like central asia and exposed him to languages like kazakh, uzbek, and kyrgyz.

p.p.s. i hope there’s a future scene where armand talks about history and he mentions that what we call the mughals were actually gurkaniya - whose founder babur would have hated to be referred to as a mongol!

[what-even-is-thiss]

I’m doing a casual tears of the kingdom replay and Link is a really short Hylian. We already know this. He’s shorter than almost every adult in almost every game he’s in. But I’ve started trying to figure out if anyone is as short as he is. And I think that Purah actually is about the same height as he is. She’s just wearing high heels.

This also makes me think of something. The flavor text for the pieces of the armor of the wild set make a note of how comfortable the set is and how well it fits Link. Which is supposed to indicate that this Link is the fabled hero of the wild, yes. But it also makes me wonder. Do any of his clothes he buys pre-made around Hyrule actually fit him?

Another thing to consider is that there’s only one version of an armor set available for purchase. Which is obviously because it’s a video game and the world revolves around you. But if we’re looking for a watsonian explanation, in retail stores the leftover pieces are usually the extra small pieces. And if this rule holds in Hyrule it seems to indicate that Linky never needs to worry about buying something that fits him because he’s so short. No matter how sold out the clothing stores are they’re still trying to get rid of their XS stock and Link is their only male customer that wears that size. Well, him and Robbie. But Robbie only has one outfit.

[burst-of-iridescent]

How come people complain more about Aang not teaching Kya or Bumi about Air Culture than they do about how Katara didn’t teach Tenzin or Bumi about Water Culture?

I’m not denying that it was wrong for Aang to do that and Kya’s + Bumi’s feelings were valid. But Both Katara and Aang did the same crime. Katara wasn’t forced to do/not do anything, She made her own decisions. Plus The practice of only focusing on one culture had continued years after Aang died.

well, for starters: katara didn't take kya on solo vacations while leaving her other children at home with her husband. katara didn't forget to mention that she has non-waterbending children to the rest of the southern water tribe. bumi didn't feel the need to apologize to katara for not being a waterbender. tenzin and bumi didn't hold resentment towards katara well into their fifties.

i think that's a pretty clear indication of why people might complain more about aang's canonical treatment of his non-airbending children than katara's supposed neglect of her non-waterbending kids.

besides, how can we assume that katara didn't teach tenzin or bumi about water tribe culture? maybe she did. maybe she tried, at the very least. but that's the real issue: we don't know. we aren't told. and that's why it's impossible to say that katara and aang committed the same crime, because there is a stark disparity in how much information we are given regarding their respective relationships with their kids: we know something about aang's dynamic with his kids, flawed and dysfunctional as it may be, but we know next to nothing at all (at least within lok) about the intricacies of katara's relationship with her children. they visit, she loves them, they love her... and that's it. that's pretty much all we get.

and that comes back to the heart of the problem with the kat.aang relationship: katara always comes secondary to a.ang. katara exists in the legend of korra as the arbiter of aang's legacy, not her own. tenzin and bumi display no connection to their water tribe heritage not because katara doesn't care, but because the narrative doesn't. exploring the mixed heritage of the kat.aang kids with equal attention paid to both their parents' cultures would require an active investment in katara's character, and that's not something the story of lok is interested in. she's a NPC, an exposition machine, a plot device, nostalgia bait... but certainly not a character with agency and autonomy of her own. the kat.aang kids' swt ancestry is made irrelevant within lok largely because katara herself is.

but if you're looking for a watsonian explanation for why katara might not have taught tenzin and bumi about her - and their - heritage, all you have to do is look at a.ang's own treatment of water tribe culture within atla to find a far more disturbing answer. though likely unintended, there are some very troubling implications there, and the characterization of the kat.aang family within lok only worsens them.

[saintsenara]

Also would love to know what you think of Lily/&Sirius as well! I can totally see the slight resentment on his part you mentioned but i loveee the letter Harry finds in DH. AND tell me your thoughts on jilypad bc I just need to dig your brain

thank you very much for the ask, pal!

i know this was prompted by me saying - while discussing jily - that my preferred version of lily and sirius' relationship is one in which sirius resents lily for stealing the love of his life [and i don't mean lupin!] away from him. so i think it's worth clarifying what i mean by this:

because i certainly don't think that sirius' resentment towards lily would be overt - i don't think he'd ever be openly hostile towards her, i don't think he'd do anything to undermine james and lily's relationship, and i don't think he'd ever be anything other than sincerely delighted that james was so happy. he evidently values the relationship he has with lily - enough to have kept her letters somewhere he could retrieve after his sojourn in azkaban [the most plausible date of the letter harry finds in deathly hallows is august 1981, which means that we know sirius wasn't living at grimmauld place when it was written. this is something he's stored deliberately, rather than something he had just lying around.] - and i don't propose that he was pretending.

what i think, instead, is that sirius' canonical tendency towards suffering and abiding would make him actively want to cheerlead jily's relationship. he's someone who clearly believes that it's honourable to make sacrifices and that his own happiness is subordinate to the greater good. and while this is all very noble, it's also an enormous - and somewhat toxic - burden for someone like lily to bear.

i like the idea of sirius - much like his narrative mirror, snape - having an extraordinarily idealised view of lily which the real lily struggles to live up to [which provides an interesting watsonian explanation for why he only mentions her once in canon - the doylist reason is just that the series needs to obscure lily's centrality to the mystery for as long as it can, but it's much more fun to imagine that sirius actually knows nothing about the version of lily he didn't construct in his head]. i also like the idea of him struggling constantly with guilt over how he secretly would like to see james and lily split up, so that he could comfort james with tender forehead kisses [and much, much more...]

when it comes to lilypad as something non-platonic, then, my preferred version of the ship is one in which sirius and lily end up together after she survives voldemort's attack [and is, therefore, able to exonerate sirius by revealing that wormtail was the secret keeper] as an extraordinarily unhealthy way of dealing with the earth-shattering weight of their mutual grief. this doesn't mean that i think it would be an abusive or toxic relationship - nor that it couldn't last - but that it would be a... strange and quite melancholy one, haunted constantly by james' ghost.

which means, i suppose, that it's also my preferred version of jilypad. i don't like it as a triad when it's just written as really happy and flawless [well-functioning polygamy takes introspection, and none of these three strike me as possessing that ability...], but i do like it as a mess.

[thecarnivorousmuffinmeta]

So I know you think Tom didn’t kill his dad, does that mean you believe he never met him? If so, why do you think Tom didn’t go to confront his father that night?

The time @therealvinelle and I said that Tom didn't kill his dad.

You Can Think Whatever You Like

Most people think Tom killed his parents, it's the accepted explanation by far in canon. I don't happen to as detailed in an hour long podcast episode, but that's just me and @therealvinelle.

Also worth noting is that this is a Watsonian blog, not a Doyalist blog. What that means is, given what we see exactly in the text, I try to figure out what happened even if it's not the authorial intent.

Given what we saw, it's unlikely Tom killed his father (far more likely it's Morfin). I don't know his motivations for doing one thing or another, that's not something I can really infer when we know so little about him.

Do I Think He Never Met Him?

Possible he did, if we take Frank at his word, he does see a dark-haired man go up to the house.

We don't really know though and I'm inclined to think probably not given that no one cites the strange boy who looks like Riddle walking across town to get to Riddle Manor from the Gaunt shack.

Instead, Frank is the only witness to anything and only when he's right at the house, and his description of what may or may not have been Tom is... strange and suspect.

But Alright, Why Wouldn't Tom Meet His Dad (And Therefore Kill Him)?

Trains.

While it's possible laws and such have changed, in HP canon, Harry only learns Apparition in sixth year. Further, we know the age of majority/allowed magical use stays the same as Dumbledore cites this when Harry asks how Tom did the magic to murder his family while he was under the age of seventeen.

It's possible Tom had been taught Apparition or else learned it on his own, but he had no way of knowing it wasn't tracked by the Ministry not to mention it's highly dangerous if unpracticed and Tom would likely be wary of trying it.

We also know Tom still would have had to have taken some form of transportation to get to Little Hangleton, since you can't Apparate to a place you've never been.

It's possible Tom took the Knight Bus, except that Dumbledore did an intense investigation into what had happened and didn't cite a Knight Bus dropping someone off or picking them up in Little Hangleton or any nearby area for that matter.

Most likely, Tom took the train.

Now, we don't know where Tom lived during this time period. It's possible he stayed in London during the war (not being evacuated with the other children because he was off in school) but it's also possible that Mrs. Cole came through and Tom managed to get relocated somewhere during the summers.

Regardless, wherever Tom's at, he's probably going to have to take a decent train ride to get there and a decent train ride to get back. That train's going to run on a strict schedule and if Tom misses that last train then he is thoroughly fucked.

Now, Tom arrives in Little Hangleton and it's extremely doubtful he had any idea where he was supposed to go. The Gaunts live in a very out of the way little shack that Tom would not simply stumble across. It probably took him some time to find Morfin. Tom also probably didn't realize until he met Morfin that his father was even in this village/even in the area, as it's unlikely people would say to him "oh yes, that big manor up there is Riddle Manor where they all look just like you" without prompting.

What I'm getting at is Tom probably eats up much of his "in Little Hangleton time" just finding and dealing with Morfin.

It's not inconceivable to me that he felt he had too little time afterwards to meet with his father, not to mention he'd just be showing up at the doorstep "hello father, remember me!", and this is a very rich Muggle family and it would be a seriously weird meeting that would take time.

After Morfin, and after stealing his ring, I can see Tom just not having enough time and not really having the emotional capacity to deal with his father on top of dealing with Morfin. He's got to get that train back.

[broodwolf221]

cole—spirit or human? 

this, like all my meta, is just my personal feelings or interpretation: I am not trying to claim any kind of objective correctness, or to dismiss those who feel otherwise. I remember conversations about cole being somewhat strained so I'm hoping ppl aren't going to be super weird on this post. 

so—cole. I've played both routes and I actually enjoy both of them, but I'm strongly inclined towards making him more of a spirit, and my reasoning comes down to three primary aspects: 1) respecting cole’s autonomy and his choices up to this point, 2) acceptance of an “other” way of being as equally valid to a “human” way of being, and 3) making him more human feels weirdly to me like asking him to replace the real cole in full rather than be himself

1—respecting his autonomy.

cole states early on that he became more of who he was and less human, and that it lets him help. that's a choice he made. on a personal level, even though he's just pixels, I find it deeply uncomfortable to unmake the choice he made about his nature. I understand that he's shown as happy and fulfilled regardless of which path you choose, which is part of why I like both, but this is why I prefer the spirit path: making him more human feels, to me, like the inky is making him more… palatable. or like the game is giving a “comfortable to the player” option. I felt this way when I first played dai when it was new, and I continue to feel this way now

he is happy in both and that's nice, and i like that there's no strong delineation of a right v. wrong choice. at the same time, i've always gotten the sense that cole wants to be more spirit—maybe not because it brings him joy or satisfies him, it could well be that he just believes he will be more useful/functional as a spirit, but even making "bad" decisions (which i don't think this one is, but for the sake of argument) is an individual's right and part of their autonomy

2—acceptance of an “other” way of being as equally valid to a “human” one

in a watsonian, in-text view (which does tend to be my approach), I think it's very important to accept the personhood of spirits, even when they're so fundamentally different. spirit!cole forgets things, can erase negative experiences, etc.—there's a lack of what we'd see as typical growth and maturity going on there, but I'd argue that we can't really effectively apply human (or “mortal” ig, bc elves, dwarves, qunari…) norms to a spirit. 

cole as a spirit of compassion is the way a spirit is supposed to be. the way a spirit is supposed to be is not the way a mortal is supposed to be. and to me, it does feel like his preference throughout the game is to act as a spirit. he stays "pure" and "clean," and that allows him to help without becoming corrupted or changed. it's tempting—and not wrong—to view this through a human lens and to find it unhealthy for him, but i tend to defer to solas' explanations of how spirits are in this case. they can easily be corrupted because they are a Single Thing. that is their nature. wisdom is wisdom; changed by perception, expectation, memory, or pain, it becomes something fundamentally different. spirits are malleable in a way mortals are not

3—replacing the “real” cole 

tbf, this one isn't really supported by anything in game, just a personal discomfort. but he “became” cole after the young man's death. honestly, I find that a little uncomfortable, but I can understand it: the textual “simplicity”/purity of spirits makes sense of that kind of reaction to compassion’s “failure,” its inability to help the real cole (according to its own standards where help=fix: it did help the real cole by being there) 

so, to me, it reads a little like you're confirming that direction when you have cole become more human. ik it's not presented that way, but yeah, personally just makes me uncomfortable bc it feels like I'm encouraging cole to view himself as a replacement of the real cole 

spirits can come back, but they are the sentiment that gave rise to it in the first place, not the individual being itself. compassion taking on cole's name in the first place feels like that to me, but becoming more human feels like it's taking it a step too far. bc then cole becomes a young man who's taken on the face and name of a dead man and it's… it's a lot. for him to grapple with down the line, for the people around him, for everyone. but as a spirit, that kind of behavior feels more like a way of recognizing and respecting the being that came before 

and of course, cole isn't 100% either—he's more human or more spirit. so it's fair to say that it'd still be a sign of respect and acknowledgement of the real cole even if he becomes more human, it doesn't turn automatically into a Bad Thing, and the complexity can honestly be fascinating to explore, bc i imagine as more-human he will develop some complex feelings about all of it

[disniq]

i havent read all of the comics post urban legends to gotham war with jason, but as far as i remember between them jason didn't really kill anyone? tfz is on my mind (he tried to kill 'bane' but didn't). i suppose he couldve been murdering off screen as well but i also have no idea if that's hinted at

anyway with tmwsl and the beast war stuff having him kill it means:

urban legends -> stops killing

gotham war -> is brainfuckedup by bruce. cant do shit

tmwsl -> joker unbrainfuckedups him, he proceeds to go ham and kill some goons/tries to kill the jokers

beast world -> still killing in larger amounts

so if bruce had left his ass alone would he still be in a holding pattern with the bats? way to fuck it bruce (though im happy. so.)

obviously the doyalist explanation is they probably realized jason was in a bit of a limbo atm and decided to shake it up again. but watsonian is soooo funny to me. good job b

Thank you for bearing with me anon, I'm finally free from work and mostly compos mentis at the moment, so!

My initial instinct when I got this ask was to disagree, because I didn't read Jason's behaviour in the last issue of MWSL as any more or less violent than he was in the earlier issues, I don't think he ever actually killed anybody in that run (though do correct me if I'm wrong on that), and I'm extremely reluctant to take the Beast World characterisation into account because it's a, uh... reductive view of Jason, at best.

But.

BUT!

As I was turning this over in my head, I realised why it was pinging at my brain.

It's because this exact thing *has happened*, back in RHatOs Rebirth.

Pre-rhato 25 my beloathed, Jason had been consistently using less-lethal methods in exchange for Bruce's implicit approval and regular interaction with the batfam. He specifically says this on panel in The Trial of Batwoman, this is a choice he chooses to make against his own beliefs;

Detective Comics #975

This holds until six months later, when Jason shoots Penguin. And then Bruce famously snaps and beats the everloving shit out of him in a brutal and notably one-sided fight.

After which, Jason changes up his outfit, swaps the guns for a crowbar and a katana, and becomes significantly more lethal again.

RHatO (2016) #25, RHatO (2016) #26

And when I thought about it, well. I think you could argue that each of Jason's more lethal spells are proceeded by an altercation with Bruce.

Brothers in Blood, where Jason plays a murderous, knife-wielding Nightwing to annoy Dick, is the first Jason story after the infamous Under the Hood showdown wherein Bruce chooses to cut Jason's throat instead of... doing literally anything else instead.

Batman: Under the Red Hood, Nightwing (1996) #118

And after working relatively civilly with others throughout Countdown, Jason goes full murder gunbats in Battle for the Cowl after Bruce's delightful little "you're broken and you'll never be fixed" hologram speech.

Battle for the Cowl #3 , Battle for the Cowl #1

Now, I absolutely do not want to come across like I'm saying Bruce is responsible for all Jason's more extreme actions at all, because I'm not about that lack of agency shizzle at all. Obviously Jason was already very much down to kill prior to his final confrontation with Bruce in UtRH, and I think he does genuinely believe some people deserve to die.

But I think this pattern of Jason reacting to Bruce's outright and often violent rejections by escalating the very behaviour that has Bruce repeatedly rejecting him is super interesting as a facet of their continuous cycle of abuse.

So regardless of Beast World, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Jason does lilt more lethal for a hot minute before he inevitably makes consessions to get back into Batman's good books.

[sylvanas-girlkisser]

Crack theory time.

So, one of the big visual differences between Arcane and League is Zauns technilogy glowing purple rather than green yeah? This is of course due to the addition of shimmer as an extension of chemtech.

It's also pretty heavily implied that shimmer is somehow tied to the waters around Piltover, or possibly the creatures therein. Like, to the point where I would go so far as consider it text.

Jinx also has pretty distinct animal theming, more so in League than Arcane: her minigun is a bunny, her rocket launcher is a shark, her grenades are piranhas etc.

So then in S2 we have Sevika's Jinx-ified arm right? And it' also a piranha.

Sure there could be any number of both Doylist and Watsonian explanation (e.g. Jinx had to scavenge for parts) but hear me out.

League tends to lean heavily on color coding to signify the origin of things, and purple/pink tends to be almost exclusively reserved for a certain deep sea themed group.

THE VOID!

I don't think we're gonna do a full deep dive into like, Icathia or whatever, but there was Silco's whole thing about being transformed after bleeding out in the waters of Piltover bay.

And then of course there's the "temple".

I've seen a few theories about who this is supposed to be, including Janna or Orianna, but here's the thing. League tends to be pretty consistent with the hairstyles of their characters... Cause otherwise you can't tell the womens faces appart.

Notice how there appears to be some sort of indententation on the statues forehead? You know who else has that side swept medium length hair? The scrunkly:

BEL-BEL!!!

Now I can't see them actually doing anything major with this, without doing some sort of acrobatic fucking pirouette over the shark. I just think its really elegant world building that you get to see this existential thread moving around in the background of the story.

In away, it's like the reverse of Marvel's post-credit "it's me, Plonko" approach to setting up sequels.

[majorbaby]

let's talk about trapper's flaws then:

in s02e03 radar's report he contemplates how easy it would be to kill a patient who he perceives has caused the death of another patient. this is commentary on how state propaganda affects civilians because in the opening scene, trapper states "they're all brainwashed to see any american as the enemy", in reference to the same patient, a chinese soldier - his single most plot-relevant lapse imo.

he's stepping out on his wife and she's probably not cool with it but it's hard to link to an obvious overarching flaw because he's shown to be otherwise honest, loyal and selfless, just not towards louise. the flaw here for me is marrying her in the first place instead of living by his values, so maybe even connected to the previous bullet point - dishonesty to oneself as a result of outward influence

misogyny. no two ways about it, but kind of boring because it's not unique to him.

he shares a personality with hawkeye - but this is a concern that the audience might have, not a concern other characters might have. unless you're frank burns i guess, in which case, the flaw is being a bleeding heart liberal (which would make for an interesting fic imo)

he's not quite passive, but he's less active than Hawkeye, so maybe he could fall into apathy without a spark to set him off - but again, this is me trying to find a watsonian explanation for the Trapper character being the follower half of the HawkTrap duo

there's a handful of other instances where he does some unsavory stuff, but they're almost always one-offs that are contradicted by other consistent behaviours:

stealing hawkeye's watch in s03e22 - I mean, he steals hawkeye's watch to bet in a poker game, but it's a good thing he does because hawkeye uses the winnings to get the army off his back. also like, hawkeye bet Trapper's face for a chance to fuck Margie so shrug

i feel obliged to mention the note thing but again, it's a one-off, and what's the flaw here? avoidant? nope, he waited around as long as could. not anticipating a need that even the audience couldn't have anticipated at this point because there's never a mention of it up until s04e01? but he's steadfastly stood by hawkeye at every turn up until this point, it's hard to imagine what could have led the writers to write such an exit except for the fact that wayne rogers unexpectedly left the show. in this way, trapper's exit is not unlike henry's death: bad luck, bad timing

he's dismissive of hawkeye at first in pierce/hyde instead of, idk, playing along with the delusion or whatever the good option was here. the epilogue kind of negates this though because it implies he knew what was "wrong" with hawkeye the whole time... but i suppose we can pretend it only occurred to him when he saw hawkeye drive off hauling the general in the latrine

[racefortheironthrone]

Speaking of Magento and his identities, wasn’t there some to do about him supposed to be Xorn originally too?

With all the best will in the world, I am not going to explain Xorneto or the post-Morrison retcon in detail, because it simply does not make sense on any kind of Watsonian level and it makes my head hurt trying to hold the whole thing in my mind at the same time.

All you need to understand is that for their own sui generis reasons having to do with their love of Silver Age comics over Bronze Age comics and their family background in the non-violent anti-nuclear movement, Morrison infamously despised Magneto. And so they set out to write the last Magneto story that could ever be told, which culminates with a drug-addled master of magnetism enacting a human genocide in Manhattan.

While Grant Morrison's New X-Men is rightfully considered to have been one of the greatest runs post-Claremont, this particular plotline and character arc (in a run that was not exactly lacking for shocking twists and unusually adult themes) proved to be the most controversial aspect of the run - to the point where Marvel editorial immediately retconned it as having been actually the work of Xorn who had pretended to be Magneto pretending to be Xorn. (And let's not even get into Zorn, and no that's not a typo.)

For a fuller explanation, I would point you towards the excellent Cerebrocast episode featuring Spencer Ackerman, which features a respectful but passionate debate between Connor Goldsmith and Spencer over the merits of Morrison's story and the ensuing retcon. For what it's worth, I side with Spencer; I think that as powerful as the story at the time was, it was ultimately a mistake by a gifted creator who never resonated with why Claremont's original retcon was so essential to making the character one that people cared about.