#I'd be fine if I'm wrong but narratively it doesn't make much sense for it to be the mimic

[tiredmaster]

Okay about the abandoned ending, I see a lot of people say that it's OOC for Gregory or that it must have been the mimic. While I may have missed something (I did the ending last night and haven't watched anyone else play it) I think this is pretty in character for Gregory.

While he is a kid, he is above all resourceful and puts himself first. I think he cares deeply for people but, if the risk to too high or threatens his life, he will cut ties. Assuming he is friends with Vannessa, then he would know what it's like being mind controlled by William and how dangerous he is. While he probably cares a great deal about Cassie, I think the risk that she would bring back William or be mind controlled by him is too great.

It is like the trolly problem- kill your friend or kill potentially dozens of kids? Ofc he failed, assuming Roxy found Cassie alive at the end, which I think is sort of hilarious.

Like, damn. Now you have TWO ladies you tried to kill after your ass. F

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

Wait how is Adrien supposed to be Ken in Miraculous? There is to many things that should revolve around him because of his family, like him being a sentimonster, his dad being the main villain for example

I remember watching Barbie Life in The Dreamhouse 2012 and in the show there was an episode where Ken realize he really didn't have a life outside of being Barbie's boyfriend. So he tried other things or at least attempted to because everytime barbie called he was there. At the end of the episode he realizes he's fine with not having a life outside of barbie. Ken was Barbie's accessory and he was totally fine with that infact he took pride in that. And this works because he has nothing major going on. He doesn't have a parent that wants revenge and his friends are barbie's friends

Adrien has a life outside of Marinette. He does fencing, he models, he's a rich kid whose the face of his fathers brand and has to go to social functions. He's a sentimonster and she knows but he doesn't. There were no secrets that big between barbie and Ken. Honestly the show could focus on Adrien it would make sense and probably be a lot better or we could have episodes where he's the main character because those so much going on around him because of his family

Adrien can't be Ken because he has a life outside of Marinette and there are times where certain episodes should have him be the main character for that episode. Ken didn't have a life outside of barbie and there are zero times episodes should have been about him.

Hard disagree that the show would be better if Adrien replaced Marinette as the main character, but other than that, you're preaching to the choice, anon. That post was NOT me saying that Adrien has the narrative weight and setup of Ken. It was me highlighting the existence of a writing issue that I'd first brought up in a different post. Namely that the writers are acting as if Adrien is a character like Ken. In broader teams, he's often written like a classic girl-power male love interest whose only purpose is supporting, causing drama for, and being shipped with his designated girl.

There's nothing wrong with those kinds of characters, but if that's all that they wanted Adrien to be, then they did a horrible job of setting him up as you already pointed out. Adrien was not given the kind of backstory or narrative role that fit a classic girl-power male love interest. That doesn't change the fact that this how he's being written, which is why I brought up the Ken quote.

It wasn't me saying, "you're silly to expect Adrien to have a more active role in the narrative, he was never set up for that." It was me saying, "even though Adrien should have a more active role in the narrative, he isn't being written like he does and - at this point - I don't think that he ever will be. You really should set your expectations accordingly or else the show is just going to keep upsetting you because the issue that I'm pointing out isn't just a matter of opinion. It has strong textual backing and even seems to be a 100% intentional read unless the head writer is lying for some reason."

In other words, if you want stories that focus more on Adrien? Then give up on canon. Stick to fanon. It's ridiculous, but it's also reality.

[bestworstcase]

Tbh I don't think anyone's saying that Oz has Never Done Anything Wrong Ever, or at least, personally, that's not my belief.

While personally I believe that Oz hasn't tried actually destroying Salem or erasing her from anyone knowing about her at all, I ALSO believe that Salem Is Not an irredeemable monster. I do believe she's trying to overthrow the gods rn, and that she hates the sword of damocles that is the mandate and has been trying to keep Oz from summoning the gods up until now (bc yknow, why wouldn't she try keeping the Relics from him??).

Plus, her fear wouldn't be unfounded (I still believe Oz was gunning for the task for a long time), and the narrative of "Salem is right" can still easily happen. Plus it's not like Oz is innocent; 1. He lied to Salem for their entire marriage 2. He decided to gun for the task Light gave him 3. Hasn't even tried communicating with Salem and 4. Has demonized her in his mind and to those in his circle. Both and neither are at fault imo. Oz fucked up big time, and he knows this, but the belief Salem hates him and his own self hate is keeping him from Actually Doing Anything. I think this also goes for Salem, fear and possibly self hate keeping her from communicating.

I just come from the perspective that both fucked up, Oz a bit more than Salem ofc. I just think that Oz isn't nearly as bad as people make him out to be. Like, this probably sounds really rude so I'm sorry in advance (/gen), but I feel like Oz being paranoid for No Reason and constantly trying to destroy Salem or erase her from public knowledge and demonizing her for No Reason beyond his own paranoia and unwillingness to change makes him seem... almost cartoonishly bad. Like it makes him sound like an abusive husband 100x worse than Adam and Jacques combined. And beyond that, it makes Salem seem completely innocent pre-war, that she was just dealing with her Abusive Husband who's delusional and paranoid.

To me, it doesn't feel nuanced, or at least as nuanced. I DO like the idea, but only as an AU. Not only that but I feel like it'd be really unfriendly to casual fans, people who don't do analysis n stuff, bc unless you bother analyzing every 2 second scene, you won't pick a lot of this up. And this is in terms of the writers, not you lol. Rwby IS meant to be analyzed, but not a lot of people will bother, and those who do haven't exactly picked any of this up.

I do think they're good theories to have though. Really it just gives me an excuse to re-analyze scenes and see if my thinking is flawed. I mean, if it's straight up Confirmed that your theories are right, then I'll be like "Oh, huh, I was wrong". I figured I'd just give insight to what people are probably saying bc I haven't seen anyone say that Oz is an innocent uwu wet paper bag. Cause he's NOT innocent, but I just don't think he's as bad or evil as people insist he is. And I do my best to analyze without any form of bias. I *did* come to the same conclusion about Salem lol.

Anyways sorry, this got long dhchvj. I hope I don't sound rude, I'm really tone blind (autism), I'm just doing my best to give insight to what people think. Cause trust me, it annoys me just as much as you to see people try to claim that Oz is innocent or that Salem is an irredeemable abusive witch. Cause obv neither is true lmao.

I hope you have a good day :] /gen

you’re fine. 

the core issue i have with the reasoning laid out here is that it demands a presupposition that oz is… well, a miserable spineless cowardly fraud who’s spent untold millennia pretending to believe in a pointless cause that he knows he will never lift a finger to advance in any meaningful sense. because it’s made quite clear that ozpin’s inner circle believes that they’ve been at war with salem for decades, that the huntsmen academies are fortresses oz built not to merely defend the relics but specifically to "stop salem"—that’s the language qrow uses in V4 and oz echoes it in V5—and that this is what oz has been doing for centuries if not   thousands of years, fighting to protect remnant from salem. 

the way qrow discusses the great war in both WOR and V4 insinuates that the conflict was really a proxy war between oz and salem, glynda chides ironwood by telling him "ozpin has experience the rest of us lack," in V3 the inner circle tells pyrrha "we are the protectors of this world" and "our group was founded [hundreds of years ago] to protect both mankind and the maidens" by "remov[ing] the maidens from the public eye, allowing their existence to fade away into legend." or as qrow puts it in V2, "we’re the ones that keep the world safe from the evils no one even knows about!"—i.e., from salem—"[which is] why we meet behind closed doors, why we work in the shadows."

now, while ozpin’s difficult relationship with the truth means we do need to be skeptical as to the veracity of these historical claims… the inner circle is circumspect on the details, but they’re not lying or misrepresenting the purpose of their group. they earnestly believe these things because this what ozpin told them, and in V5 we see oz recount the same general narrative to team RNJR: "i am the combination of countless men who have spent their lives trying to protect the people of remnant […] this curse was bestowed on me by the gods because i failed to stop salem in the past, but we must stop her now."

so there is no ambiguity at all about the story oz tells his closest allies: he is trying to protect the world from an ancient hidden evil called salem, who defeated him once in the distant past but can be stopped now by keeping the relics out of her hands, and in order to do that it is essential to keep the relics and the maidens secret (lest world rip itself apart in wars to claim this incredible power) and likewise to ensure that salem’s existence remains hidden (lest everyone panic and be wiped out by grimm). oz and his inner circle frame this as an secret struggle that has been ongoing for centuries, if not thousands of years. 

his inner circle had no reason to disbelieve what ozpin told them prior to jinn’s tale. and even after the lost fable, no one questions the narrative that oz has been fighting salem for a very long time. "ozpin believed that the best way to fight salem was to do it in secret," says ironwood. "ozpin spent his whole life, many lives, keeping this secret," says qrow. later in V7, ironwood describes salem as "an ancient and terrible evil," and in V8 ruby says "this isn’t some new enemy or invading kingdom, this is a force we’ve faced before, for centuries… salem."

for the moment we’ll just accept the presupposition that salem’s war against the huntsmen academies began with the attack on amber following perhaps a decade of planning and careful preparation, incited by whatever happened when she met summer rose, and that before that time salem was not actively participating in shadow war. 

if this is taken to be true, the question with regard to how ozma has spent all this time becomes: do we believe that he’s been doing what he says he has—trying to "stop salem" by guarding the relics and keeping all these secrets—or not? because it is undeniably true that this is what ozma CLAIMS to have been doing for centuries if not millennia. when ozpin tells people this story about who he is and what he’s spent lifetimes trying to do, is it because he genuinely believes that he and salem have been embroiled in a secret cold war all this time, or… is he just lying?

why would he lie about that? 

consider the things he definitely did lie about. why didn’t he tell anyone that salem can’t be killed? he feared they would fall into despair and give up, lose all hope and the will to keep fighting. why did he lie about his personal history with salem? he believes loving her is his greatest mistake ("the hearts of men are easily swayed" etc) and he feels ashamed, guilty, regretful, desperate to make amends yet certain she will never forgive him and terrified that even if she did it would doom the world—the truth is messy and complicated and he’s convinced that what he wants is evil, so he buries it. 

why, then, would he pretend to still be fighting her when he actually isn’t? if ozma had, at some point, resolved this inner turmoil on the side of "salem was right, the god of light is wrong, i am not going to fulfill my task and will instead dedicate my existence to insuring that the relics are never brought together, the best way to protect remnant is by rejecting the gods and their redemption," why would he lie about that? why would he continue to promote faith in the two brothers and the final judgment he foretold long ago (ozpin includes this story in his anthology with notes urging his readers to believe in it and to act each day as if the gods will return tomorrow)? why keep telling his closest allies, his friends, life after life, that he was sent to remnant by the gods themselves to stop salem from changing the world? 

why wouldn’t he change course?—and i want to be very clear that i’m not asking why he wouldn’t seek reconciliation with salem, because emotionally that’s quite a lot harder. but if he decided the divine mandate was bullshit and he wasn’t going to follow it any longer, why would he not… er… stop telling people that the brothers are the Real True Gods who left behind these divine relics which he is put on this world to keep safe until the final judgment? 

ozma strove to keep salem and the relics a secret for lifetimes—and ozpin was stridently opposed to revealing the truth, we see him and his inner circle balk at the idea time and again explicitly because ozpin insists that secrecy is essential to stopping salem, so we have no reason to doubt that he really did feel strongly that keeping these secrets kept people safe—so in the event he changed his mind and came to believe that the brothers were enemies of humanity who must be kept at bay… surely he would shut his mouth. 

but the brothers and their final judgment aren’t a secret! ozpin published that story in a book of fairytales with a commentary telling his readers to prepare themselves to be judged! after jinn’s tale, nobody freaks out about the divine threat of execution should mankind prove unworthy because they already knew that part; it’s the mainstream doctrine of a well-known religion that exists all around the world, which qrow and ozpin had already told them was real and true. 

oz is not a bad person. he certainly isn’t some sort of craven charlatan who’s spent thousands of years exhorting the world to believe in and follow a creed he secretly opposes—even if he still believed that salem was dangerous and needed to be stopped, it would be so simple to cast the gods as dangerous adversaries who must also be prevented from ever coming back. 

like, he wants people to live. he wants the world to be safe, even if at the cost of his own happiness. that is always what ozma is trying to achieve—even during the ozlem kingdom, he sacrificed the happiness he’d found with salem in their little cottage to try uniting the world with her because he truly, genuinely believed his happiness came at the cost of humanity’s salvation. 

it follows that the reason ozpin tells his close allies that it is his god-given task to stop salem by keeping the relics out of her grasp whilst striving for unity and keeping all this a secret, he does so because he truly, genuinely believes that it’s the best way to protect the world. likewise, when he uses his public platform as the headmaster of a prestigious academy to publish an anthology of tales, including the one about the two brothers that articulates the divine mandate exactly, upon which he comments this: 

We have a fragile peace, and in some ways, we are more divided than ever. Even if the gods aren’t real, even if they don’t return to judge us for our deeds, we should act each day as though they are arriving tomorrow. In the end, we will be the arbiters of our fates. We will either create a beautiful, peaceful world and live in harmony together or destroy ourselves and our planet, and the gods will judge what we have chosen.

ozpin really earnestly does believe that proselytizing the brothers, imploring everyone to live as if the gods will return for the final judgment tomorrow, while keeping salem, the maidens, and the relics secret, is necessary and the best way to keep people safe. he wouldn’t be doing this if he thought it didn’t protect people!

so the story he tells his inner circle about WHAT he does—his purpose, his methods, his strategy—is true. it must be true because it would be both reprehensible and beyond foolish for ozpin to convince his allies they’re fighting in a war he knows isn’t real for a cause he doesn’t actually believe in, and ozpin is neither reprehensible nor stupid.

it follows that ozpin a) believes he has been fighting a protracted covert war over the relics with salem since the ages, and b) can be taken at his word when he says that insuring the relics and salem’s existence remain secret is an essential part of his strategy, especially because without fail he prioritizes secrecy above every other concern throughout V1-6 so he’s very much putting his money where his mouth is in that regard.

in V3, the inner circle makes the claim that their predecessors ("this brotherhood"), centuries ago, chose to "remove the maidens from the public eye, allowing them to fade away into legend." while i do have my doubts about the historical accuracy of that claim—a) the nature of the maiden inheritance rules would make it very difficult to keep the maidens under wraps and b) i think it’s more likely that ozma always intended for the maidens to act covertly, didn’t know what would happen when the first four died, and only pieced it together after a few centuries had gone by and he started to hear stories about young women blessed with magical power and went "…ah."—i don’t think there’s any reason to doubt that the maidens became a fairytale because ozma decided they should be kept secret. 

neither oz nor his inner circle make an exactly equivalent claim about salem… but. the situations are quite similar: the maidens were once "common knowledge," and when ozma first reincarnated he traveled around for years hearing tales of "the witch" wherever he went. some time long ago, ozma and his allies undertook to suppress public knowledge of the maidens, and in the present the last trace remaining is an old fairytale that no one could believe holds any real truth. as for salem, no one knows about her anymore either, and "ozpin spent all his life, many lives keeping this secret." 

the existence of the relics, similarly, is a secret because ozma chose to keep them secret—although the crown seems to have passed through at least a few pairs of hands before ozma tracked it down, hence the fairytale. (this is a subject for another post, but i actually don’t think 'the indecisive king' is about ozma—ozpin’s commentary on it is VERY impersonal and perfunctory compared to what he has to say about 'the infinite man,' 'the girl in the tower,' 'the story of the seasons,' or even 'the grimm child.' i think the original inspiration for the tale was some other person who had the crown before ozma found it, and he included the story because, as he says, he thinks it has an important message.)

so, basically, in the present ozpin and his inner circle are hiding three big secrets: the maidens, the relics, and salem. it’s stated outright that the maidens are secret because ozma and his allies chose to hide them from the world. 

of the relics, three are entirely unknown and one is the subject of a single fairytale of which the reliability is unknown (although my bet is on "the real crown isn’t that straightforward and may not actually work like that at all"); oz has been in possession of all four for at least fifty or so years. we know he found the lamp first, thousands of years ago, that he used both the sword and the crown to end the great war eighty years ago, and ozpin raised atlas using the staff. it’s very likely that he found the other three much earlier. the fairytale inspired by the crown suggests that one might have eluded him for a while.

in any case, once he had them all (and a few centuries had gone by to allow the story about the crown to be forgotten as anything but a fiction), ozma would’ve had nearly absolute power to decide who knew about them—salem being the only other person who could tell anyone, and at the time she didn’t know anything more than "there are four relics of some kind, somewhere in the world, that will call the gods to remnant to judge humankind if they’re ever brought together."

so the relics, too, are secret because ozma decided to keep them secret.

this leaves salem. before the rise and fall of the ozlem kingdom, she lived on the fringes of civilization and knowledge of her existence was widespread. (her decrepit house sat at the end of a paved, well-maintained footpath—she was within walking distance of the nearest town and did not make herself remotely difficult to find.) thousands of years later? nothing but fairytales that are, like 'the story of the seasons' and 'the indecisive king,' either believed to be entirely fictional or (in the case of 'the grimm child') about a real, if very rare, phenomenon unrelated to salem herself. 

this is not something that could have happened at all if salem hadn’t withdrawn from civilization as far as she did—which is one of the core reasons i think she hasn’t been at war with ozma all this time—so she tacitly allowed it to happen. but why did she withdraw so far? 

here is the part where it gets murky and highly speculative because we just don’t know what happened or where she went or what she did in those first few hundred years after the ozlem kingdom fell. it is plausible that salem just ran and kept running until she’d gotten as far away from people as it was possible to get, and stayed there in self-imposed isolation until, well, now—in which case ozma’s effort to suppress the knowledge of her existence would have mainly entailed not telling anyone about her and maybe destroying bits and pieces of the historical record. 

(i do think he’s made an active effort to keep her secret all this time, regardless: that is his first priority at all times until jinn spills the beans in V6, and if he can’t keep the world safe by destroying her then making sure the world doesn’t know she exists is the obvious Plan B. if nobody knows about her, no one can piss off the gods by siding with her. it’s really more a question of whether she put up a fight.)

hooowever. salem is a character defined by loneliness and longing for freedom, which to her explicitly means connection with others. love. companionship. this is why the gods punish her by making her immortal—separating her from the one she loves forever—and then when she overcomes that by going out into the world and turning her immortality into a gift that brings her closer to people and allows her to form new alliances and friendships, rather than a curse imprisoning her in isolation, the gods just. kill everyone. and leave her alone in the ashes. 

and as i said, even when salem is miserably isolating herself before ozma, she isn’t that far away from civilization—she’s living by herself but close enough to somewhere that she could walk into town, and her presence there was not only well-known but welcomed enough that people built a road right to her doorstep. this during a period of her life when she was so profoundly depressed that her house was rotting and falling apart around her! 

the point is that while salem does inarguably have self-isolating tendencies, i… don’t think hers are anywhere close to being as severe as ozma’s. his rendition of himself in 'the story of the seasons' may well be more poetic than literal ("So cold was his heart that the lands around him were covered in snow, the trees were bare, and animals and Creatures of Grimm alike avoided him. For centuries, no one dared disturb his peace…"), but at the time ozma certainly would have had the magical power to freeze all the land for miles around to keep people away from him, and even if it’s only a metaphor for how he felt then the implication is that he hid himself away in total solitude for possibly multiple consecutive lifetimes…

…whereas salem, at her absolute lowest, in the darkest depths of her self-isolating depression, lived by herself a short way from the edge of some town whose residents were probably rather wary of her (she’s not exactly friendly, nor human, and everyone knows she’s a witch) but nevertheless accepted her as a member of their community (because salem certainly wasn’t the one bothering to take care of that path). 

the way things ended between her and ozma, his deception, the deaths of their children, their kingdom collapsing, all of this was extremely traumatic for her and haunts her to this day just as ozma; i have no trouble at all believing that salem would flee to the edge of the world in the immediate aftermath. 

but i find it a lot more difficult to believe that she would stay there for thousands upon thousands of years if the only thing preventing her from returning to the margins of civilization were her own guilt and self-hatred. the gods punishing her by murdering the whole world, being completely alone for hundreds of millions of years, grimming herself, and the way humans would have treated her in an era when faunus were hunted down and caged like beasts wasn’t enough to drive salem into exile. i don’t believe her self-loathing, by itself, is strong enough to overpower her desperation to be free for very long.

i also really doubt that ozma would just, for lack of a better word, trust her to stay gone. especially not if—as jinn implies—he believed salem kept finding him somehow and sending grimm after him, which probably wasn’t true (her command over the grimm seems to be restricted to the ones she makes, and the incarnations we see in this part of the lost fable were not at all significant persons easily identifiable as ozma), but it isn’t an unreasonable fear for him to have? given how badly things ended between them. 

we know salem doesn’t like, obsessively devote her time to scrying until she’s found ozma again (because she doesn’t bother to do that after ozpin dies, she’s caught completely off guard by oscar—and if she doesn’t do so while she is actively waging war against him, it’s unlikely that it ever crossed her mind to try it at all, or else her scrying just doesn’t work that way), but ozma doesn’t have any way of knowing that. we know salem doesn’t control every grimm in the world, and oz seems to have figured that out eventually, but in those first few centuries before he found the lamp? he had no idea what salem might be capable of, what powers she might have hidden from him!

like it isn’t that ozma has No Reason to be paranoid. he knows that he hurt her really badly and that when salem gets hurt she lashes out, often in extremely vindictive and extremely violent ways. (he has no way of knowing that salem has spent these thousands of years clawing her temper under control, and no reason to think she would try.) he probably had no idea to what extent salem being grimm might be influencing her thinking—that’s where all the really deep distortions start to take root, ozma anxiously second-guessing every little thing like were there warning signs i ignored? was he right? did i let infatuation blind me to what she’d become from the very start?—by the time he finds the lamp, assuming jinn didn’t skip over any lives, he’s on his fourth life since the end; that’s a span of like, at least two to three hundred years depending how long he lived and how much time it took him to reincarnate each time. 

that is plenty enough time to convince himself she’s nothing but an evil monster who needs to be put down before he finds the lamp, and then he immediately uses his three questions for that lifetime so it would be another full century after that before he had the opportunity to ask jinn anything about… what salem is doing now, or what she lied to him about, or if she told him the truth after all. which is a terrifying prospect to even consider after a) multiple centuries marinating in an inescapable anxiety torment nexus echo chamber and b) hearing she can’t be destroyed, period. like what if the truth turns out to be "yeah the pool of grimm destroyed her soul and also she wants to burn the world to the ground and eat your heart now because you ruined her FOREVER!!! and there is nothing you or anyone else can do to fix her. you stupid fuck." like his cursed haunted brain keeps screaming at him 24/7?!

so.

we don’t really know anything about this period of time before ozma went after the lamp, except that "no matter where or how he lived, her presence was always felt." jinn combines that with a memory of two beowolves attacking ozma’s town to insinuate that salem kept sending grimm after him, or at least that ozma believed as much. 

but. but—"during his years of travel, he heard the same frightened whispers that spoke of a terrifying sorceress who commanded dark powers in the wilds, among the beasts and monsters. ozma was convinced that this woman was salem, and decided that he needed to see what she had become."

"but no matter where or how he lived, her presence was always felt. if humanity were ever to stand a chance at being united, one thing was clear… [he had to destroy salem.] knowing he could never rid the world of her through any mortal means, ozma sought out the power of the relics: armed with my knowledge, he believed he could fulfill his promise to the god of light."

<- these are parallel statements. everywhere he travels, he hears stories about a witch; no matter where or how he lives, her presence is always felt. ozma was convinced that this terrifying sorceress was salem; ozma grew convinced that he had to destroy salem for humanity’s sake. he needed to see what she had become; he needed to find the lamp to guide him. see the repetition? the echo?

i don’t think salem just vanished into the wilderness. i imagine she ran pretty fucking far, but remnant is a big world and there are people all over—there have even been people living in the southern region of the now-uninhabited continent where salem presumably lives, based on the map shown in WOR: vale. 

(the markers for those settlements are red in color; all the other markers are color-coded to the kingdoms, orange for vacuo, green for vale, while for atlas, blue for mistral, yellow for menagerie and what i assume are a couple of faunus settlements in southern anima, with tracks with the white fang’s headquarters being located vaguely in anima. in the blood-splattered map in the great war episode, there’s a fire burning in the southern peninsula of the uninhabited continent—implying battles were fought there and possibly that some of those red settlements existed as recently as eighty years ago. 

i turn this over in my mind a lot. it doesn’t make any sense to me to think that salem could have been remotely present in civilization anywhere within the past century, but rwby is so particular about color that the only reason to choose red for the now-defunct(?) settlements on the continent where salem lives would be to imply some degree of association with her, and if a WHOLE KINGDOM had been destroyed i think that would have been mentioned so these were probably just free towns and villages—possibly with a loose connection to vacuo? it’s sort of the logical place for displaced peoples from vacuo to wind up after fleeing their conquered kingdom. and in that case their "connection" to salem might be nothing more than her having taken pity on a bunch of refugees with nowhere else to go and kept the grimm off their backs until the great war…happened. but i would like to know.)

…the point being, i think "her presence was always felt" because salem, after some decades, maybe a century, hating herself deep in the wilderness, crept back to lurking on the periphery of civilization because a) ozma was gone and she had no idea where, when, or even if he would ever come back again and b) no matter how determined she is to punish herself, she just isn’t capable of wallowing in abject misery forever, even when she was the only person alive with absolutely no hope she kept moving until she found something to try.

so naturally people would have kept gossiping about the terrifying dark witch who lives in the woods among the beasts and monsters, and ozma would have known it was her. imagine if he’d reincarnated for the second or third time, wound up on a different continent altogether, and immediately started hearing the exact same sort of frightened whispers as before? even if it was pure unfortunate coincidence and salem did not have the slightest idea he was there, how terrifying that would be? and if salem didn’t want him to find her because she was scared or ashamed or angry or all three, then she couldn’t stay in any one place for too long—so this sort of indirect crossing paths oh-gods-she’s-already-found-me nightmare scenario could conceivably happen more than once.

(frankly, even if salem wanted nothing to do with him and was trying her level to avoid him without just never being able to come within sight of another person again, i think her not vanishing forever makes ozma’s intense paranoia so much more understandable because like. very literally, no matter where he lived, her presence would always be there—rumors, frightened whispers, everywhere. of course he’d start seeing her in the shadow of every grimm!)

i don’t think they’ve ever actually come face-to-face since that night—maybe glimpsed each other from afar across a battlefield, but if they’d met or spoken to each other i imagine it would have been necessary for jinn to show it happening. BUT i do think it’s likelier than not that there were several centuries when salem was legitimately an inescapable presence dogging ozma through life after life because she was just sort of… wandering around in a miserable traumatic haze on the very, very edge of civilization. and people talked about her.

so he went for the lamp, and fell into the depths of despair when jinn crushed whatever passed for his hope at that point. that is, almost certainly, what pushed him into his hermit era. 

now! if the fairytale’s centuries of eternal winter isn’t a pure fiction—if there is even the smallest kernel of literal truth in there as to ozma using magic to force people, animals, and grimm to stay far away from him, then. if salem was not already living in exile, this would have been when she began to hear rumors about him. yes? this is the first thing he does that would rise to the level of local legend salem might possibly hear. 

that his seclusion ended with "and then i met four young women who reminded me how to be a person so i gave them my magic" as opposed to "and then salem turned up with thousands of grimm to murder me and salt the earth" suggests that if she wasn’t living in exile at this time, her interest was probably more in avoiding him than vengeance.

and if that’s so, what does she do upon finally discovering where he is? er, probably travel as far away from the Cursed Wizard Forest as it is geographically feasible to go and decide that this is fine, that’s his continent and this is her continent and they can just stay on opposite sides of the planet until the end of time and never have speak to or see each other again. amen. 

if we take the fairytale literally, several centuries pass. lifetimes. enough time for salem to find somewhere to, if not quite belong, at least become a constant because well she’s been here since before granny was even born and no one knows who or what she is because she doesn’t really talk to anyone, but she’s not hurting anyone either, and legend has it that a goliath once attacked our town and the witch just walked out of the woods and exploded it with a glare, and that’s why grimm never come here, so she’s our witch. maybe enough time to send someone halfway across the world to check on the Cursed Wizard Forest to reassure herself that yes ozma’s still there, he’s not going to come after her and he must have come to his senses about the gods so she’s. safe. ish. as long as no one ever finds those relics. 

the fairytale ends with the hermit dividing his magic among the four maidens, and then he says: "My rest is over. It is time for me to resume my journey and work as well."—they didn’t just resuscitate ozma’s will to live, they restored his faith and his commitment to his task. maybe the world can be saved! maybe he can really do it this time, now that he’s found people willing to help him shoulder the burden!

(i do firmly believe that ozma told the original four maidens about his task and salem’s sworn hatred of the gods and the danger she could pose to the world if he emerged to try again, before offering them magic—as we see in v8, he isn’t naturally predisposed to lie or manipulate people, that’s a pattern he only falls into when he feels hopeless and scared. so i think he and the original maidens planned to gather the relics and get to work on uniting humanity, and the vague fairytale ending is an obfuscation.)

aaand i think that’s when he went after salem, because he emerged from his Cursed Wizard Forest after multiple lifetimes rotting in solitude, filled with new hope and ready to try again to complete his task, immediately tripped face-planted into rumors about the witch in the woods AGAIN and panicked. 

he can’t kill her, he can’t get rid of her… she can’t be stopped but, as oz says to hazel, she can be fought and someone has to try. doesn’t he have to try? if he believes the world can be saved, isn’t it his duty to try?—he knows she’ll never, ever bow to the brothers, she made that excruciatingly clear, and as long as she’s present in the world, as long as people might listen to her about the gods, remnant is doomed. so he has to make her go away. somehow. he has to try.

i think for salem all it would take is once. one time. if she still tried after everything to do what was right, leave him alone and not hurt anyone else and pick up the pieces as best she could. because the thing is, salem blames herself for getting her daughters killed in her anger—that’s why she tries so hard to keep her temper in 6.4—she hates herself for lashing out that night as much as ozma hates himself for the same. that self-blame would counterbalance her anger at ozma: yes he lied to her yes he tricked her yes he attacked her but she attacked him right back and now her children are dead.

how much of a temptation is vengeance with that clawing around in her head?

but if her mindset was like, "that was the most horrible thing that has ever happened to me and the worst thing i’ve ever done, and i don’t understand why he lied to me but i just want it to be done, and he’s over there and i’m over here and we can just. leave each other alone forever," and she found a place for herself where she started to feel maybe almost kind of ok again and then ozma violated the truce she’d invented in her mind but never thought to communicate to him by appearing out of the blue to attack her, completely unprovoked as far as she could tell, and whatever little town or village or even just one single person who’d been kind to her got destroyed in the resulting fight?

that’s an injustice. that’s i did nothing to deserve this, how dare you do this to me. 

and… that’s also, i think, the one thing that would compel salem to willingly cut herself off from all civilization and remain in exile for thousands and thousands of years (because she’s impossible to kill and too powerful to force her out if she decides she’s not going to go gently into the night). her fear of collective punishment. if she thought there was even the smallest chance that ozma might start doing what her father did or what his gods did to anyone close to her, i think she’d go and stay gone until she felt absolutely certain she could take him down forever.

(also theres a certain narrative elegance to the idea that they had their horrible mutual-incineration duel where they were equally matched in every way… and then ozma rotted in isolation while salem tried really hard to be okay and convinced herself they could just stay peacefully at a distance forever, until he found a spark of hope that ignited all his desperation so he went after her and she was blindsided by this truly awful and unfair and egregious thing that he did… and then she rots in isolation and ever-mounting desperation while ozma tries really hard to fix everything and pull the world into a semblance of peace until she finds a spark of hope and blindsides him with this brutally ruthless charge for the relics. 

they explode each other, fly in opposite directions—downward spiral vs picking up the pieces—then reach critical mass and explode again so hard they fully reverse positions and do the whole ordeal again. so it’s both a journey of learning to understand each other and a vicious cycle they can only escape by inversion of the first exactly-equal fight that exploded out of nowhere from a seemingly happy partnership, i.e. both reaching out unexpectedly in the midst of a seemingly inescapable conflict. it’s about symmetry)

This Has Been A Very Long Post Sorry About That. but—all speculation about the details aside—i do strongly feel that the most compassionate reading of ozma is that he is completely sincere about whathe’s trying to achieve (uniting humanity without committing genocide or turning salem into a scapegoat so everyone can be saved including her!!) but has absolutely no idea how to make it happen and has only just, in his second-to-last life as the king of vale, accepted the reality that it isn’t possible, and thence the whole building a replica of salem’s father’s castle to put his office in her tower-prison and hucking his emotionally tortured anthology of fairytales out the proverbial window (you know, like the girl in the tower who writes herself out of danger, coming from mr. fairytales this is a tornado siren of a cry for help) so forth. 

thus what he and his inner circle say about his efforts both past and present is true—he has been actively working to keep salem a secret for as long as the maidens have been hidden if not longer. as long as salem cooperated by not wandering around letting other people see and/or talk to and/or run away screaming in terror from her, what "erasing salem from public knowledge and keeping her existence secret" means, practically speaking, is tracking down any texts that clearly describe her as a real person (not a fairytale) or artistic depictions of her from the ozlem kingdom and destroying Those, and perhaps muddying the waters of all those folktales by inventing new nonsense out of whole cloth or mixing stories about her with other stories that definitely aren’t about her to a) blur the details and b) make it look to future scholars like the witch-in-the-woods was a loose folkloric archetype encompassing a huge variety of different beliefs and superstitions as opposed to one very specific kind of story about one very specific witch. 

which is a bit obsessive and weird but given the fate-of-the-world stakes at play here and the plain unarguable fact that humanity cannot be redeemed if anyone sides with salem against the brothers, which is demonstrably something she can accomplish if given the opportunity, honestly pretty restrained. 

and so the million dollar question is: what does it take for salem to cooperate by staying in exile? is the fight in lost fable and her guilt over her daughters shattering enough to lead her to just give up and hide forever alone?—who knows, right now it’s purely a matter for speculation, but i think the circumstantial evidence suggests "no" more strongly than it does "yes." 

which is not to say that she was the pure innocent victim of an abusive revenge quest, but rather that i think the facts of the situation for her would, in the immediate aftermath, tilt her in a more positive direction (he did a horrible thing but so did she, and she’s survived many horrible things before, and she can’t exactly lay down to die instead so she has to do something, and she doesn’t ever want to see him because it hurts so much and she’s so angry but her anger killed her daughters so she cannot ever let it out again so she’ll just have to stay away from him and live with it) whereas ozma. yknow. Spiraled. and her being elusive but inescapably present in the world make that so much worse, which isn’t either of their faults, it’s just a terrible situation.

it’s like. short of literally stumbling into each other by chance and yelling at each other until it was all Out There. i think no matter WHAT she did, ozma was bound to snap and lash out at her sooner or later because he spent centuries. centuries!!! with all this trauma reverberating and intensifying in his head with no reprieve because there were stories about her everywhere he went.

and then as soon as he does that salem’s lifelong extremely traumatic history with collective punishment and her self-hatred and guilt are going to smash together and she’ll run the fuck away to alternately freak herself out and plot his downfall and tailspin while ozma, meanwhile, after a few centuries of her being gone and the endless rumors fading into just old folktales no one really believes anymore, finally gets the distance he needs to catch his fucking breath—his hermit era doesn’t count he was just ruminating for centuries—so he can focus on other things. and by then keeping her a secret mostly boils down to "don’t talk about her" lmao

his paranoia never really goes away, as we see in 9.10, although he does also get really complacent by ozpin’s time, and i think it’s irrational and grounded in a lot of very wrong conclusions he reached during those first couple centuries of Spiraling—but given what he did and did not know at the time i do also think the reasoning and inferences he made were fairly logical; it becomes irrational over time as the reality of the situation (salem avoiding him) increasingly doesn’t line up with his perception, but as we see in V2-3 ozpin is supremely, irrationally confident that salem is not about to unleash a major attack, which suggests that on some level he’s aware that his paranoid beliefs are unsound even if he hasn’t yet had the conscious realization. he’s right on the cusp. 

& then none of this precludes smaller scale, limited conflicts like e.g. salem assassinating a troublesome member of his inner circle or throwing grimm at people to intensify social conflicts and insure ozma never gets comfortable enough to invite his gods to remnant. i’m very sure that salem has made it a habit to check in on him at regular intervals and cause problems if it looks like he’s doing too well because she Does Not Want him to ever summon his gods. and that’s obviously going to be one-sided because i don’t think ozma actually knows where she’s hiding, and salem’s terror of collective punishment is her own seething bundle of irrational paranoia, because after he digs himself out of Spiraling ozma absolutely would not kill people just because they happened to be near her. 

[princess-glassred]

Alright hot take incoming:

Beverly Marsh in it 2017 is a terribly written female character and i'm tired of pretending like she's not.

As a woman, I love Bev in fics, I love 90's bev, I love fannon Bev, and this is no discredit to Sophia Lillis as an actor, or even 2017 Bev's personality, but it 2017 Bev is a perfect example of a character being fine but everything else about her being incredibly anti feminist (in my opinion).

First of all there's all the slut shaming, now don't get me wrong, i'd get it if this was just greta and henry and her dad. They're antagonists and it makes sense for the time period, BUT Bev is not jusy slut shamed by the antagonists, she's indirectly kind of slut shamed by the narritive. When Richie first meets her he tells rumors about her sleeping around, especially with Henry Bowers and he faces almost little to no pushback. Yeah eddie tells him to shut up, and Bill says "they're just rumors" but it really shouldn't matter if they're just rumors or not. The movie seems to think that the slut shaming is bad because she isn't sleeping with anyone, when slut shaming should be bad just because its a fuckin mean thing to do. Even if she did date Henry, who the fuck cares? It's literally her life, obviously she doesn't like him now. Also the way Richie words it as "Bill had her in the third grade" is 🤢.

In the bathroom scene they take time out of cleaning just so she can clarify to Bill that he's the only one she's ever kissed so I guess Bill can feel like a real special man. Even though she doesn't owe Bill really anything, let alone reassurance that she's only kissed him once. I'd absolutely understand if this was Bev reacting to her CSA, assuming she needs to make them men around her feel special by having a low body count, but the movie portays this scene as really sweet and romantic so i doubt it's the case.

The movie sexualizes Bev so much, and again, i'd understand if this was supposed to be commentary about her CSA but a lot of it is genuinely meant to further the plot or played off for laughs. Almost every single scene she has is about her sexual history or which guy she ends up with. Even Ben, who's entire thing is he's hopelessly in love with Bev gets more of a personality than just that. She's called a slut by greta keene, flirts with ben outside, """flirts""" with Mr. Keene to steal his shit, leaves the pharmacy to get oggled by Bill in slowmo, gets slut shamed by richie, gets oggled at the quarry, ect.

The movie also tries to act like she's a much stronger female than she really is, it reminds me a lot of in the 90's when they'd have those tough bad ass women who could sword fight and stuff but they'd always inevitably be kidnapped because of gener roles. I do admit that the scene of her jamming the fence post through pennhwise is cool, and so is the scene where she hits her dad, but her badassness is incredibly underminded in a lot of ways. First of all when they're asked who wants to go in she's the only one to raise her hand but she STILL doesn't go inside. Why? What possible reason could the narrative give as to why she stayed outside? To comfort Stan??? God forbid a girl helps save the boys unless it's in the smallest way possible. And then she gets kidnapped and essentially used as a plot device just for the boys to get back together. We can't just have them work things out and apologize and show up for each other because they're friends, they all need a woman to go rescue.

Having Beverly say "I am not afraid of you" is just lip service when you still have her be a damsel in distress, which she is officially rendered right after pennywise puts her in the deadlights. And now we come to the worst part of this whole thing, which is the deadlights kiss. Now, i'm some one who will defend snow white and sleeping beauty with my life, because i know how fairytale curses work and with sleeping beauty phillip is out right told that's what he has to do. This is not what happens in the movie. Ben and Bill see Bev dangling there, and after like half a second of trying to snap her out of it decide kissing her is the only way to get her out of this. Ben even sees Bill do it and fail but instead of trying literally anything else he thinks "i love her more, maybe it'll work with me!".

Guys I do not give a shit about how much Bill and Ben care about Bev, if anything that just makes kissing her while she's out of it worse. You may try to justify this by saying it really was the only way for them to do it, but that still doesn't change the fact YOU wrote it that way. YOU decided the only way to save bev was to kiss her without consent. Which you actively contradict with richie getting caught in the dead lights and snapped out it in it chapter 2. Stephen King didn't even write that shit, say what you will about the child orgy, but at least Bev was awake for it. She consented about as much as a girl her age could given that she's only 11. That's way more problematic than this but at least it was her idea, at least she conciously decided this was worth doing. All you've done is take a creepy sexual act that was at the very least consenual and displayed some sexual agency in the character, with a creepy non sexual non consenual act that took away agency. How girlboss is it that her first kisses with her love interests weren't even while she could could consent? She is kissed three times, once during a play and twice while she's unconcious, neither of which are her idea. I'm not saying a woman always has to instigate things romantically, but if you spend your whole movie talking about how she's a slut, maybe you should give her some free reign over her love life.

This is why I love 90's Bev so much, she's just a little fiesty tomboy who saves the boys asses with a sling shot and an epic blow to the head. She doesn't get damseled in distressed (the only time she gets saved are when Ben defends her during the rock fight), the boys aren't overly horny over her, the only people who really treat her like her gender defines her are her father, Tom, and Henry she's just great. And that came out in the 90's! I don't think the 90's miniseries is necessarily better than the 2017 movies, but I think their treatment of Bev is just inherently more feminist given that they don't constantly try to define her by her body counts. Yes she loves ben, but she has more to her than that. Even if you bring up things like body count to try and say she isn't a slut who's obsessed with boys, it's still not feminist because you're still constantly equating her value to who she's with. The only proper way to adress slut shaming is by acknowledging it's none of the characters business what she does and that if you do it at all you suck. But IT 2017 doesn't do that, because Bev's sexual maturity is explored only through the eyes of men, and that includes the narrative.

Her promiscuity is explained through Richie when she's not even there (who i will give the benefit of the doubt here and say was being mysoginsitic to try and compensate for his queerness, but even then, using a woman's sex life as a tool to make yourself feel better is awful no matter your reason), she only consents to anything until the very end, and this movie tries to act like it's not doing any of it by giving her a few measily crumbs of strength outside of being the guys girlfriend. I never felt like IT 2017 was one of the guys, because the movie would never let her be that. Fuck.

If you are a woman, or even just AFAB and disagree with this you are free to, I do not speak for every woman in the world and if you feel differently I will not try to change that. I can only speak my truth though, and my truth is that it 2017 Bev pisses me off.

[dorkynerd23]

NOT ALL CARTOONS NEED TO HAVE LORE AND BE STORY-DRIVEN

I just gotta say this real quick because it's honestly been on my mind lately and I think more people need to see this because this issue is kinda an ongoing problem with cartoons these days, especially with cartoons with high expectations from some people out there, and with the recent TCS hate that's been happening around lately on Twitter, I'd figure I make a post and give my thoughts and also give my thoughts on people who expect every cartoon now to be story-driven and have lore.

Not all cartoons need to be deep and serialized, have shipping, ect to be good and watchable, not every cartoon needs that and it isn't always necessary. I'm saying this because people still whine and complain about the reasons TCS and shows like it, (like BCG, TGAMM, and more) are just bad because it doesn't have deep storytelling and isn't dark, (Hell, some haven't even watched the show and given it a chance, and still call it shit) but it isn't really relying on that and besides, cartoons are supposed to be fun and give you a good and fun time, it shouldn't matter what the story is just as long as you're enjoying watching them. Now let me just say this, there's absolutely nothing wrong with liking shows that have lore, the issue is setting up high expectations for other shows and being upset because it doesn't have lore, not every show needs to be like Steven Universe, The Owl House, Amphibia, and so on, not all shows need that, AT ALL. Sometimes it's good and fine to watch characters going on wacky adventures and just be episodic and fun, not everything needs to be serialized to be good.

And also, let's not forget before shows like Avatar The Last Airbender came around, we always mostly had shows that were episodic and didn't take themselves all that seriously and we're just there to make you laugh and have fun. :) Trust me, I enjoy and love serialized shows (even though they aren't always my cup of tea, it depends sometimes) as much as others do, and I do get interested in what'll happen next and things to theorized in lore type of shows and enjoy seeing the world-building and strong storytelling. But, at the same time, sometimes I just wanna step away from serialized shows and just laugh and turn my brain off and a thing I love and enjoy about slice of life/episodic shows is rewatchability. And while yeah, overarching narratives can be rewatched, but it's kinda hard to pick out an episode in a serialized show because some episodes might include some important details that you might've missed and such and have to go back, if that makes sense. So most of the time I usually wait until a show ends to really catch up and watch them, since it's kinda difficult to watch a show that's still ongoing.

Now, even though I absolutely love and adore Cuphead and the show, I'm not gonna act like everything in the show works because it doesn't, there are some issues. TCS isn't perfect at all and is pretty flawed and there's things I hope they approve on if they get renewed hopefully, but I just wish some would appreciate the series more, because most criticisms I've seen of the show is that it's not like the game and doesn't have lore, which is criticisms I'm honestly sick of when it comes to shows like TCS. It's understandable if you don't like the show and just aren't a fan, but at least understand and see that not every cartoon needs to be grand and epic to be good and give actual reasons for not liking it! To conclude, I just think episodic shows should be more appreciated and deserve so much better, and it isn't fair for how people treat slice of life shows, it's okay to like and enjoy both serialized and episodic shows, they're both good and great in their own way.

Sometimes, all a cartoon needs is a blend of fun, comedy and along with heart, you don't always need a deep, grand epic story for cartoons. There's no need to fight and harass others over which one is better and more superior, just let people love and like what they love, let people enjoy their cartoons!

I'd totally recommend watching these videos by Alpha Jay Show + KashCash when it comes to my post, because I think they do a better explanation and talking about this ongoing issue in the cartoon community and the high expectations people seem to get when it comes to certain shows. Again, this isn't me trying to start a fight and harass anybody, I just wanted to give my opinion on this issue because it's really starting to be talked about on Twitter, so many people are really just tearing down The Cuphead Show for simply not being serialized. Even though as I've mentioned, not all cartoons need to be that and besides, shouldn't we remember that TCS is clearly trying to be based off 1930's cartoons, especially shows like Looney Tunes, Mickey Mouse + Disney cartoons, and Tom & Jerry. Which didn't take themselves seriously and we're just very simple and there to make you laugh and smile! They're also still very loved and appreciated by so many today and they didn't rely on anything big and epic, and give anything complex to be entertaining and enjoyable.

(Links To The Videos I've Mentioned!)

[Alpha Jay Show - https://youtu.be/0jSXat7kEa4]

(A Deep Dive Into The Awful Criticisms Of Cuphead)

[KashCash - https://youtu.be/UcB3ZtziXvg]

(Not All Cartoons Need To Have Lore)

[brsb4hls]

Welp, judging from the possible spoilers, predictions and interviews I actually think the finale will go fine for every character, except maybe Sylvie.

That would suck, since she truely got the short end of the stick basically the whole show. I still hope for a decent conclusion for her arc, but you'll never know.

To me she is the only wild card.

What I think will happen:

*Loki will take over for HWR and stay at the citadel. I'm absolutely sure. He won't die, the MCU will keep him as an asset and for possible cameos.

The only thing that could go wrong here would be not giving him enough power to make it awesome.

*the tva will continue to exist. But just for monitoring. I'd be ok with that for the sake of the characters (not for the tva itself).

*the variants will get a conscious peek at their time lines and decide to stay at the tva, it will be bitter sweet and melodramatic.

(Mobius might see that his boys are thriving with another Don, OB loves the tva science anyways, Casey well duh, B-15 might stay out of responsibility or because she was meant to die on the tl or whatever).

B-15 officially takes a leading role, Mobius stays in middle management and keeps up morale. He's great at that.

*the multiverse will be free. We still didn't fully get to that yet, and one spoiler tweet claims that the 'lie' from the trailer is indeed the loom. The loom is pointless (in regards to keeping lines stable) and will not be fixed. The multiverse will expand.

The time lines will be stabilized by Loki himself.

*I like Brad as a character, but am ok with whatever might happen to him (possible death)

*Ravonna could get eaten or put back on the time line. Given her recent action she most likely will be an Alioth meal, unless they have one last surprise for her character. We did get a glimpse at her actual life though, so she might make it.

*Kang will have forseen everything up to Loki revisiting the citadel, but will not 'win' there.

The general speculative consensus is that the MCU can either keep him or exchange him for Doom as future villain, so it will be an ambiguous ending for Kang, where it just looks as if he'd won at first.

*Now Sylvie: narratively it would make sense to have her stay with Loki at the citadel. Kang asked both of them to take over.

They have been arguing over different philosophies the whole season, so both of them together would mean balance.

Sylvie is referred to as 'meaningful' and described as having 'a deep connection to Loki' in interviews.

But: the MCU doesn't exactly do couples (with few exeptions).

If the MCU wants to keep using Loki for cameos or even as Avenger prime (hey I can hope ;)), would they have to include her? Could they?

Loki by himself seems easier.

Sophia talked about saying goodbye to her character. (So no reprise of that role).

So Sylvie could either die (fuck that tbh) or get her own mission elsewhere (I'd be ok with that).

Or get reset in favor of little Sylvie if that would work logically (well, fuck that too).

(There will be a 'sacrifice' in the finale, but that could be anything tbh, it could also mean Loki saying goodbye to her and conciously erasing their meeting, if her life gets reset. Great for Sylvie, who would start over with no memories, very sad for Loki, convenient drama insert)

So yeah, I'm pretty sure I'll enjoy the finale, but that could be the only shitty thing.

It wouldn't matter much, of course. It's just a show and they hardly end the way I want (not you 'Lost girl', you did great. SPN also).

But I would love to be wrong in my pessimism and get pleasently surprised with a perfect ending.

[bookwyrminspiration]

What do you think of the theory that Sophie’s dad is actually a human? I think it fits the bill in regards to “shaking up the foundation of the elf world,” as said by Forkle. It would also make sense because of her brown eyes (although that could also just be from the alicorn) and I can’t remember if Forkle said Sophie’s parents weren’t human, but Forkle has been proven to be a sneaky little guy so he could just be lying. I think it would be quite interesting from a narrative perspective.

I've spoken to this theory before! I don't know where the post is, but my general consensus: I do think it makes a fair amount of sense, though there are some holes that make me lean more towards a no.

It would 100% shake the foundation of their world, make them question the "purity" of their species, their separation from humans, whether they truly are as different (read: superior) as they like to claim. Sophie would be the very first human-elf mix (as the story intends, anyway, though I'd argue that realistically she wouldn't be), a living bridge between worlds that shouldn't exist in their society. A black swan of sorts

However, Forkle did say that she was "100% elf" in Exile when he revealed he'd modeled her DNA off alicorn DNA. So if we believe him, then her father's an elf. But! Like you said, he's a sneaky little guy, so it's possible he lied to her about that since he was specifically trying to tell her she was not part alicorn. I feel like he's usually more of a lie of omission kinda person and not an outright lie person though.

Plus, that would make Sophie the subject of even more scrutiny, judgment, and conversation than she already is; I'm not sure the Black Swan would willingly subject her to that. They've generally tried to make her life as easy as possible, and this would Not Do That. However, there are things they do even though they'll make her life difficult because they find them necessary (multiple abilities, enhanced abilities, living with humans) so it could still be possible. But I don't know what she'd gain by being born of elf and humans that she wouldn't get from being an elf raised by humans. The different perspective and ties to humanity exist in her as an elf now, how would the human/elf mix add anything, especially when she's unaware of it?

I do think it would be incredibly interesting story wise to have a human/elf Sophie, but I think it might be too complex given the time we have left, especially since it doesn't add much more to Sophie's purpose and journey for the effort that would take. She's already got her tie to humans--maybe she'd feel better about it knowing her genetic ties, but we don't have the chance to really explore what this could mean because the story is focused on so many other more pressing things.

Essentially: fits some things, not others, and while rich in potential, I don't think the story has time to live up to that potential, so I don't think it'll happen. Would be fine being proven wrong though!

[mermaidsirennikita]

to add to the Princess conversation, it wouldn't be common to find narratives where the hero fucks other women so openly in front of the heroine in a modern HR and if it was written ppl would lose their shit in the reviews lol I thought it was really refreshing the way it is written in Princess even though I don't even like the scenario personally it just felt interesting to read bc I knew I wouldn't find now like the author truly wrote freely

Oh for sure. If we're thinking about the same scene, I personally have no issue with it because a) I kind of love that shit in books I'm not even gonna lie b) it was before Darius and Serafina got together c) he had noooo concept that they would ever be ABLE to be together. And I think Darius's relationship with sex and trauma, which (I'm almost done with the book) is similar to Lazar's but not quite the same, informs why that scene happened. His sense of self worth is... not great.

And that's the kind of thing you would honestly not see as effectively if we didn't get a look into his sexual relationships with other women. And it's not at length, we don't have these long scenes, but we see that he's slutty and it hurts Serafina's feelings because even though there's no chance that they can be together and she's in fact engaged to another man, she still loves him and knows he knows she loves him and so on. BUT! Later on, when you're in his POV, you suddenly realize "Oh, it actually wasn't this fun and sexy time for Darius, he has a LOT of issues" (many of them related to his mom, SHOCKER the breastfeeding hero has mommy issues).

I often see readers say "well I could have gotten that without that scene" COULD YOU THO. Because to me, a real issue in the romance reading discourse about What is Good and What is Bad in romance is that people only read what they specifically KNOW they're good with. They never even try something else.

And that's fine. You can do that. But if you are ONLY going to try what you know for sure isn't going to push your boundaries in any sense, then I personally don't want to hear about what you think the genre shouldn't do. I'm not talking about people reading shit that triggers them. I'm not talking about saying, "Well, I don't really love a book where the hero has sex with a woman before the heroine on the page, but everyone says this is amazing and otherwise it sounds like my shit, so I'm going to try it".

I have recommended books to people that they get so excited about, and when I mention one thing that is not triggering but is simply not to their taste, they will just go "oh never mind". And again, that is FINE. But if all you're reading is books that don't do it, I don't think you can tell me that it never works and that it doesn't belong in the genre. Which some people absolutely do. "No cheating in romance" okay but you also won't try this book by your #1 favorite author that has all the other tropes you love that all your book friends endorse because it has cheating in it.

I don't think I'd care as much, but because romance has SO much discourse about What is Right and What is Wrong at the moment, I do think it's pushing a lot of authors to be safer. If you're constantly being bombarded with takes that say "I WILL NEVER READ THIS BC X" or whatever, and all you wanna do is sell a book in a very competitive, commercial market... idk.

And I actually think the market is much more curious and open to exploring than a lot of vocal online people would make you think, lol; because the online audience is very rarely truly representative of the average audience. Like, the average person who loves Ali Hazelwood isn't watching a million booktok takes about how her book had This Thing so you shouldn't read it. They just one-click her books because they love Ali. The GENRE may influence them more than the takes--I'm thinking of my friend who ADORES Ali but hasn't read Bride because she's reluctant to try PNR (booooo).

However, the prevalence of social media makes these things seem bigger. When Gaelen wrote Princess, she went off with her "Serafina sees Darius fucking another woman before they get together" shit, and her virgin lactation shit, and Serafina being a very spoiled brat who is beautiful and knows it and uses her beauty, and Darius having the self worth of a broken twig...

She didn't have all the takes and the admittedly dramatically transformed market on her mind. And conversely, because there was more of a divide between the reader and the author, the readers often did try shit that wasn't really their thing. Sometimes they liked it; sometimes they didn't. You weren't sitting there thinking about a billion tropes, tbh. You saw a hot cover and read the back copy and took it home. Or, you saw the author's name and went "I love Nora Roberts" and went out on a limb and tried her vampire books even though you'd only read her contemporaries. And maybe you liked it and read the other two books in the trilogy, and maybe you didn't.

I think it's kind of a snake eating its own tail thing, where the market has become so responsive to the loudest readers (by no means all readers... readers of color and LGBT+ readers and disabled readers who ask for rep and often don't get it comes to mind) that it moves incredibly quickly, and authors are just throwing shit at the wall trying to build an audience, and the quickest way to do that is by throwing the shit that the wall SCREAMS it wants and not throwing the shit that the wall SCREAMS is bad. Even if that's what YOU as an author like. And often, I gotta say, especially in the early parts of an author's career, I think that the best results will come from the author saying "fuck it, I'm gonna write what I would want to read".

Unfortunately, I don't think that's really as much the philosophy anymore. Writing to market has always been a part of romance and will always be a part of every commercial genre (I mean, look at how historicals have become sooo Regency- and Victorian-centric--that happened before social media took over the book spaces), but it has become a bit more confined, imo.

So that is something I've discovered I really love about reading older books. You can tell this person was like "fuck it, I wanna write this shit".

[pantsaretherealheroes]

also while i'm talking about it - your opinion might vary on whether carmy and sydney are intended for each other romantically (i hear there's been some slightly disparaging comments from the showrunner, but i don't know for certain so i won't get into it) but regardless of if that's the intention or not, or in-story whether it would work out or not, you cannot deny that their storylines are entwined and their relationship is Meaningful - in a way that isn't the same as the relationships either of them have with any other characters.

Sydney is almost a deuteragonist - i would argue just slightly she isn't because she's the character we follow the most after carmy, but carmy story is still the main one - and her bond with carmy is this important thread throughout the show. she's the only one who understands his very specific kitchen trauma, having experienced it herself, and from the first episode she's almost a kindred spirit to him in this place that is a million miles from the high-cuisine world they know.

This causes him to lean on her like a business partner more than he should, while sometimes scolding her like an underling; and she is sometimes too eager to move forward, to impress him, that she doesn't consider his advice - neither are perfect, and carmy being her boss is definitely more in the wrong when he is - but the show makes an effort to show them working out these problems as equals. it makes a point of showing him apologising for the bad behavioural fallbacks maybe a decade or so of kitchen trauma has instilled in him, and mentoring her while being really impressed by her skill and talent.

she starts in awe of him - but he's not some kind of always-right god to her, and she very much realises that by the penultimate and through the last episode - but it means something that even when she's angry at him, when she thinks of him as a piece of shit and a little bitch, she still admits that the best meal she ever had was one of his. it means something, narratively, that before he opens the last correspondence, the last thing connecting him to his beloved, dead brother that he's spent the last season trying to grieve and understand - that he texts her about her dish and to apologise about his behaviour.

marcus and sydney have a very sweet, potentially pre-romantic scene in the final episode, but even marcus is aware that carmy made the best meal she ever had even before she confirms it. he refers to them both as having taught him a lot, he links them in concept as "the two people who've been in that fine dining world".

i don't know whether this makes as much sense as I'd like, but whether it's romantic or not, carmy and syd are inextricably narratively linked, and that means something.

[jyndor]

At this point I'm just convinced that most Star Wars fans are simply not used to thinking of their characters as nuanced, and the sequels and the disney+ stuff before andor didn't really help our case lol.

The fact that the writers retconned Luke-fucking-skywalker, the dude who gave a big F You to all Jedi traditions in the original trilogy, and also used him at Bait for the mandalorian is a true indictment of the current scenario lol.

At this point, I'm just trusting Tony and Diego more than the execs at Disney- it's clear that they want to create a specific story, and don't really give much of a fuck about the fandom which involves guys with 4+ million subscribers who have such AMAZING takes like "star wars doesn't have bricks"

jessie gender has a good video essay on youtube about andor and while i don't necessarily agree with all of it, i think the parts about how disney depoliticized star wars and made the first order almost exclusively reminiscent of nazi germany (to the exclusion of a lot of the references the empire had to us empire) as well as through use of intertextuality (almost exclusively referring to other star wars things instead of referencing to real world things like the original trilogy, the prequels and rogue one did) are 1000000% on point.

as a result fans expect cameos and easter eggs out the ass (easter eggs and cameos are fine imo as long as they make narrative sense - ie: rogue one has good cameos - mothma, saw*, bail, leia, tarkin and vader ALL make sense in the context of the story- and bad cameos - artoo and threepio are just distracting imo and don't really add anything of value except to get audience members to say HEY OMG I KNOW THOSE GUYS) and for everything to directly connect.

which... sometimes again it makes sense (the prequels being about anakin and obi-wan makes total sense, it's the point of the prequels to explain how we got to the point where luke has to fight the empire and anakin has to redeem himself and destroy the emperor) and sometimes it's just absurd and cheap. "somehow palpatine returned" auihiuahduash oh my god it's funny because it's not even like it doesn't make sense for sheev to be so obsessed with living forever and having absolute control over the galaxy, plus legends also had a story about palpatine cloning himself... but it feels absurd because the sequels weren't leading to that, we all know lucasfilm didn't have any plan whatsoever, largely bc disney wanted a fast return on their investment, but rey being a palpatine is... just insulting. rey being a skywalker is less so because of we know the main trilogies are about the skywalkers.

i don't know that i'd call any of what happened with luke in the sequels a retcon unless we're talking about how disney got rid of the entire expanded universe and now it's called legends. i mean i consider it more of a reset (especially because george lucas wasn't really involved directly with legends stories and didn't really care about any of it - not that i care what he cares about, give me my mara jade back lmfao).

but im gonna push back on luke giving the jedi order a middle finger in the OG trilogy. first off, from an out-of-universe perspective, while i'm sure lucas had some idea of what the jedi were about, i doubt he really had the order's practices worked out because lol this is the guy who didn't know that he was going to make luke and leia twins before rotj. sometimes he had his shit worked out, other times he was just figuring stuff out as he went along - and hey i get it, but lol fandom can be a bit too referential about him.

i don't know as much about how he developed the jedi so please correct me if im wrong, but there's no way that luke was intended to be a refutation of jedi practices since... luke was written decades before the prequels came out. before the prequels came out, no one in the fandom even conceived of the jedi having rules against romantic relationships and/or attachments - that's why you've got so many jedi falling in love and being married in the legends 'verse, including and especially luke.

i know my generation is much more okay with the jedi order's practices because we grew up with it and understand it more, but there was a big pushback at the time of aotc because no one had thought of the jedi being celibate or not having attachments or being raised by the order as children. but that wasn't a retcon so much as george lucas going in a direction pro fanfic writers hadn't known he was going to go in. and while he did have a final say over what legends writers could do, those weren't his stories. now i don't care lol the thrawn trilogy is great and losing mara jade as thrawn's foil makes his story less compelling (and frankly it reeks of misogyny to bring him back and not the most important character of that story but whatever). but a lot of fans were annoyed about the direction the jedi took in canon because it didn't jive with decades of pro fic.

i'm sympathetic to that. and of course add into it that the prequels were poorly executed, good intentions and ideas aside.

i don't agree that the jedi were told to fuck off by luke (obi-wan and yoda perhaps to some extent but by then their religious group had been killed off in a genocide. and only because obi-wan and yoda withhold information from luke about his father, not because they are believers in jedi teachings). in universe, remember that luke doesn't know any jedi, he isn't brought up in the order, he doesn't have that cultural context. he doesn't know about them like that. he doesn't even really get into the jedi teachings besides the sparknotes version yoda gives him in empire (and a little bit with obi-wan). he knows very, very little - so he's a new kind of jedi because the jedi were killed off by the sith.

in the time between the originals and the sequels i guess luke does try to rebuild the order but lol idk i cannot even with the story he gets in the sequels because it doesn't work with what i grew up with, it's not the luke i knew and loved as a kid. i mean im not sure how anyone can make the argument that he makes choices that are consistent with who he is at his core but whatever. that's not a retcon though (unless we consider the retconning of legends but i mean that's kind of complicated since legends was pretty inconsistent itself) since it doesn't erase his story. even if he is out of character in the sequels.

god i cannot believe im defending the sequels but yeah they didn't retcon luke's story in the original trilogy. they did retcon legends but i mean again legends was never really as canon as the films or anything that george lucas worked on.

as far as his appearance in the mandalorian, imo it is an example of a cameo done right. it was consistent with who luke is, it made some narrative sense (no reason why luke wouldn't sense grogu reaching out to him, and since he is trying to rebuild the order why not bring in someone who had some experience with the old order?) and it helped establish scale of power (similar to vader massacring the rebels at the end of rogue one) in a story mostly about a character who is an extraordinary ordinary guy (like rogue one). it doesn't take away from the core of the show - the relationship between din and grogu, and din's relationship with his identity as a mandalorian - and helps propel the story forward. similar to how ahsoka is used in mando, there's a point to it. is it fan-service? yes! absolutely, and i would argue it was sorely needed given luke's treatment in the sequels was so polarizing and hurtful to so many fans, myself included. bo-katan also makes sense since she is a literal mandalorian lmfao like it works and helps build on the differences between sects of mandalorians.

HOWEVER. juxtapose that with the book of boba fett. you've got a show about a beloved legacy character who has been a fan-favorite for decades (despite me not really caring about him before his appearance in mando lol i can't deny his popularity) and finally he's getting his story fleshed out in a way that so many fans have wanted for ages.

and not only is the story arc poorly received (imo the best parts are the stuff with the tusken raiders but even that is handled terribly because they just kill them off off-screen) but in the middle of the show, we cut away to... the mandalorian season 2.5 which then goes on to resolve the conflict set up at the end of s2 far too quickly to be as effective as it should have been.

and then as a result of the writers using 2 episodes of an 7 episode season, boba fett's story is not only structured poorly but feels rushed. he gets sidelined. in his own show. as much as din djarin gives pure 'im trying to be a secondary character in my own show' energy, he is still the core of mando. he is centered even if he isn't always the hero or the most powerful guy on screen. with boba, he feels many times to be an afterthought in the show. about him.

and that's because these cameos are really poorly used. luke could easily show up in boba fett's show because it's set on tatooine. luke could be poking around his childhood home. they have history, it's not like it wouldn't be interesting - even if i'm like meh on the idea myself. but luke doesn't show up to further boba's story. he shows up for GROGU, for the mandalorian's story arc. same with ahsoka who has no business being in bobf imo. din i can see because boba showed up in mando and they have ties to each other, but as a CAMEO. as a secondary character. poor guy can't even be the side character in a show about someone else lmfao.

this stuff is not just fan-service done poorly to me, it feels like studio meddling, like the studio was nervous about splitting up din from their cash cow baby yoda. why couldn't that have been part of mando s3? idk there's really no good explanation for it.

cameos, fan-service, even retcons and resets can be used effectively. but it depends on how they are used and why. andor handles its cameos really well because they make sense in the story. rogue one mostly does too. mando does too imo but i get why people would be frustrated with how s2 seems to overemphasize cameos... but again imo they make sense. bobf's cameos are ridiculous and insulting.

*saw gerrera isn't handled as well as the others but i'd say it isn't out of the bounds of reason for saw to be jyn's adoptive father. i think we should have seen jyn as a teenager with him.

[animezinglife]

Sorry I'm not just reblogging you like a proper person but yeah I totally agree with you. Personally I did think Tamlin was a little nicer in book 1 - but he was also less traumatized then. He really craves normalcy in book 2, so he does high lord stuff like he knows it from other high lords.

In the end, they just are incompatible, yes. They both absolutely suck at communication. Tamlin always was awkward with social interactions but they both get worse after UTM. I also always felt like Tamlin got anxiety - or yes even paranoia, which makes sense, considering. And Feyre is all over the place lol. I generally feel the word 'abuse' is used extremely inflationary in online discussions, but I honestly don't think it super applies to Tamlin and Feyre. Like everyone calls him an abuser and even with the shit he did, I really don't quite see that. But I also kinda like him as a character so I'm biased. Considering how the narrative paints it, I totally get why people project their domestic violence trauma onto him. It is all kind of framed that way for sure.

You're fine! Any format of conversation that works well with you works for me, too. There's also nothing wrong with a bias towards a character. I don't have one towards him, but I do towards Rhys and Lucien. I'll inevitably have to face that at some point I'm sure.

I definitely lean a bit more towards your end on the "abuse" thing. I'd nearly put it in quotations in my post, but I do think it's more the manipulation and control--whether fully intentional or not--that made me feel comfortable using the word. It's an inflammatory word for sure and yeah, I definitely see a projection with the fanbase. That said, those behaviors genuinely can escalate and worsen in real life. I don't blame them for it--it's just a different take that I think leaves people with different expectations going in.

Maybe he was a bit nicer--truthfully, I just don't remember that much of him in the first book. It doesn't surprise me that his desire for normalcy goes a little overboard though to the point of over-exercising control in the places he shouldn't. I can't say I'm all that mad at the reason he locked Feyre in the house. I just don't agree with the locking her in the house part.

Feyre's a funny one. Right now, the way she's acting with Rhys almost gives me a little bit of an emotional affair vibe. Personally, I've liked him better than Tam from the get-go, but for someone she supposedly wants to think is her enemy and absolutely sees him as Tamlin's, she really has a habit of spilling her gut to him and finding a lot of comfort with him.

Which, don't get me wrong, is something that can absolutely happen on an unspoken, biological level in real life, but I did smirk a bit when they were having the little three truths conversation when he was taking her to the House of Wind and she just word-vomits everything she's been feeling about her relationship with Tamlin.

Like...girl, that's a lot to tell your not-enemy who at this point in time still technically is your current lover's enemy.

I hate to bring another series into it, but a lot of the reactions to things remind me A LOT of the Twilight era.

I have to be honest: my opinion of Tamlin has somehow not changed at all between the first book and this one. Or at least, it hasn't changed enough for me to even acknowledge. I didn't hate him and didn't love him in the first, and I'm still pretty much in the same spot now.

I'm also not at all new to the fantasy genre and not even new to the fae subgenre. Tamlin's honestly pretty mild in comparison to a lot of what you get in those (especially older books).

Again, a comparison doesn't right a wrong or lessen it, but he's definitely not the worst fictional guy out there, and definitely isn't the worst fae love interest.

[dearweirdme]

The issue about tae/nnie has taken so much space in my brain for about a month now and it's making me go through such an unhealthy obsession.

I get bothered whenever that video appears in my timeline, but I'd still deliberately look for more clues and connections. I get an irrational satisfaction whenever I see posts dragging the girl (which I think is so evil of me. I mean, I never really liked her even before this, plus, her show really made me hate her more). I never engaged in fanwars. I'm just on the sideline, reading hate posts one after another. I would intentionally look for tags and stuff related to them. It's mentally exhausting. I'm beating myself up so much over it. I'm trying to find answers in an unhealthy way. It's not good.

I understand why fans are still having a hard time accepting it considering it all started with an accidental follow, then the gurumi photos, then now this. We've been debunking this for so long, so it may take awhile to accept everything. I'm still not sure if it was them coz the narrative was full of holes and downright suspicious. We haven't seen Tae in that jacket and hat, but the pants and shoes were the same. The Celine bag was there, too, held by the manager. Jennie was seen in that outfit, too, days after that. Jennie's hair was the same. Also, that fan who asked for an autograph, although super suspicious coz how in hell was she bringing a magazine with her at that time of night. The clearer video looked definitely like Tae, so I dunno what to believe anymore. They were seen getting inside the hotel, too, so, I dunno anymore.

I've been reading posts denying the rumors, too, so it's honestly just so confusing.

Thing is, nobody really knows what's the truth, only Tae and Jennie and their companies do.

I've been reading your asks, and there were a few who are convinced that Tae is not gay. Maybe we just read him wrong, and he's just an LGBT ally. However, I disagree with the anon who said Tae can't be gay because of Wooga or Bogum coz men can be friends with gays, too. I have gay friends and straight male friends, and they get along just fine.

It's been almost a month, and we still haven't gotten our answers, and surely, there won't be any confirmation happening ever. We will just live through the confusion until one day, this will just become part of our memory as their fans.

For now, we just have to remember why we became fans in the first place. We always have to hold on to that reason why we chose BTS, what they did for us. We need to continue supporting them. We don't own them. They make us happy, we should let them find their happiness, too.

Also, I realized how fickle our minds can get. If we're not mentally strong, we can get swayed easily. We create our own truths and beliefs based on our own understanding and judgment, so we have to try surrounding ourselves with more possitive things.

We're all in this together! Happy Festa!

Hi anon!

I fear you are making yourself very unhappy at the moment. I'm glad you recognize what you're doing isn't good for you. Maybe step out for a bit?

At this point you're unlikely to find out anything new about the Paris footage. But I don't even think that's where your real problem lies. You feel too unsure about Tae and Jk probably, and you're expressing obsessive behavior because you want to make sense of things and go back to feeling safe in your believes. But the thing is, we will never know exactly what's happened, so you are likely to always have a hint of doubt in your mind. That is what you have to come to terms with, living with doubt.

Doubt can make people feel really unsafe, even when it doesn't involve themselves. Just try to tell yourself that you are safe (at least I hope you are). Whatever happens to Tae and Jk has no physical effect on your safety. You yourself are not being attacked or harmed. Try to avoid reading hate. Hate is a nasty thing, it will never make you happy. You don't have to look at stuff containing Jennie if it makes you sad. It's all about choices anon, you just have to make the right ones for yourself. You do have some control here, you have the control to filter what you see.

[scrawlingskribbles]

like. hmm. I just feel like the relationship I have with polyamory is kinda interesting, I guess xD like, I know my memory is bad but if it serves me right then I might have even realized/recognized that I was polyam before I realized/recognized that I was aroace lmao, which feels like kind of a big deal, somehow?? but I suppose it's easier to recognize something that's present over something that's absent, you know? how are you supposed to know something's missing if you never knew it was "supposed" to be there in the first place?

((I'm still waiting to get a phonecall back from the doc, so I ended up rambling A LOT MORE than I originally thought I was going to with this post so I'm putting it under a readmore xD))

For instance, I have this one vivid memory from back in middle school where I was talking about polyamory with a friend while we were waiting in the lunch line once, & he basically thought I was absolutely bonkers when I attempted to describe it to him lololol. The one picture/diagram I found to help explain it is still in my phone to this day, 19th from the very start of my reel of 2000+ photos. I don't remember how I first found that image—maybe it had rolled across my tumblr dashboard at some point? Regardless, all I know is that as soon as I read it, it made something light up in my brain, a little aha! lightbulb that was like, Yes, This Makes Sense, This Is You.

And like, I'm sure that I had to have some kind of moment like that with being aroace, but I don't have any specific memory like I do with the polyam thing. It probably also doesn't help that for a long while before I realized I was aroace, I felt so broken/wrong/etc. that I'd made up this whole little narrative in my head that I was actually an android instead of a human & was just Missing that one "part" that everyone else seemed to have, that let/made them have those kinds of romantic feelings for others. (Like, I obviously didn't actually believe it, like it wasn't delusion-level or anything, but it Was how I coped with feeling so yucky during that time, letting myself pretend that I was a robot so it wouldn't hurt quite so much.) So I feel like the aroace realization/acceptance came a little more gradually, having to convince myself over time the more that I learned about it that I wasn't actually broken, just different, and working to chase away the residual negative thoughts/feelings that I'd already been living with for however long at that point. Those feelings still crop up from time to time, but it hasn't been a Genuine Issue for me in quite a long time, thankfully.

So I suppose I did feel that Absence Of Something for quite a while, but I just didn't have the language/knowledge to put a name to it at the time. With the polyamory though, it was something that had never really surfaced before, so when that nerve got struck for the first time it was only a Positive note, so maybe that's why I remember it more clearly? (Bc I wasn't even all that bothered with what that one friend thought about it; he just Didn't Get It, and that was fine. ...Okay, maybe it Was actually after the aroace discovery, bc that feels like the kind of backbone that I would have gotten After already figuring out one piece of my puzzle tbh, lmfao. Huh. Darn my shoddy memory xD).

It's also interesting to me because, like, kinda going back to the Absence vs. Presence thing, the polyamory part of me is like, way less... obvious, I guess? I don't think that's the right word but it's all I've got rn xD But like, I feel my aroace-ness every day (or like, at least every Week or so) by virtue of Not feeling attraction towards people. So it's so weird, amidst that vast void of non-attraction, to also feel just as strongly in my bones that I Am polyamorous. Like, there's quote-unquote ""evidence"" of me being aroace because I don't date or otherwise seek out romantic/etc. relationships, but there's no "evidence" of me being polyam because of almost the exact same reasoning xD Like, the way I am with polyamory is the same way that other people feel about their sexuality/attraction as a whole, which is amusing to me for some reason. People can know that they're straight or gay or bi or what-have-you even if they've never been with anyone of the stipulated gender(s), and I know that I'm polyamorous even though I've never been in a polyamorous relationship. Idk, it's just kind of a wild feeling for me, as someone who's far more familiar with the lack of feeling something xD

And like, is my polyamory actually linked specifically to my aroace-ness, no matter how oxymoronic it might seem at first glance? Is the polyamory a side effect or maybe even a coping mechanism of sorts, because I'm aware of my typical-relationship shortcomings as an aroace & sex-averse individual in a world of allos and don't mind the thought of Sharing a partner/partners, especially if that means they can meet each other's needs in ways that I personally can't, because I just want everyone to be happy? Is it a romanticization of the Two Cakes theory but with real human people managing to have open, honest, enjoyable relationships with one another simultaneously, because the more is still the merrier even if it's also more complicated? Is it a testament to my own selfishness/laziness, wanting to have my cake and eat it too, because more hands make lighter work and I can barely keep a simple friendship afloat, let alone anything """more""" than that? Is it an unrealistic idealization that, even though deep down I still feel those senses of being Broken and not anywhere near Enough on my own, someone or even multiple someones would still find my presence in their life(s) fulfilling enough to want to keep me around in a more intimate capacity than ""just"" a friend, because I still yearn for the closeness of a relationship like that even if I don't specifically feel the "attractions" that typically glues that kind of relationship together?

...I think it's probably All of the above, if I'm being perfectly honest. And that's a lot of feelings to have swirling all around at once, let me tell you xD So I guess that's why I had to word-vomit it all out here; there's no real point to this post, just sharing some thoughts/experiences that have been on my mind as of late. It's complicated inside this here noggin o' mine, lol~ TwT

[elephantinpajamas]

I'll never make fun of George Lucas again

Listen, I know. We all hate the special editions and the prequels. They ruined our childhoods, they destroyed the narrative, they devalued the Skywalker legacy. And Han. Shot. First.

Star Wars was forever marred by this trilogy of "Fuck You"s to the fans that seemingly only got made to ruin everything we'd come to love.

Fuck you. No they didn't. They are, at the worst, a series of B movie-level sci-fi films that kinda messed with our conception of a beloved franchise because we expected to have our worlds shattered by the release of a kids' movie and we were a little underwhelmed.

George Lucas always maintained that part of the reason it was so hard to write Star Wars in the first place was because he always wanted to do more conceptual stuff, to reimagine genres, and that SW was just to pay the bills. And even with that, he still pushed the billet with his outing at a new version of Flash Gordon.

By the way, it's a myth that the numerical addition of "Episode IV" to the title was added as an afterthought to the rerelease of A New Hope, it was actually intentional. Lucas had actually pushed for it in the initial release because he liked the idea of making people think they'd been thrust into an episode of a classic pulp sci-fi serial you'd probably missed a couple episodes of and you were just now catching up on. He often gets derided for writing like he's flying by the seat of his pants, and while that's often true, he always has a vision. It's how he goes about creating it that I'm getting at.

I've never been entirely satisfied with how something I've created came out. I'd want to go back and redo it as many times as I could until I felt like I got it right. And as long as I'm allowed to, I will. So I sure as hell can't judge someone else for doing the same. And that's what the special editions were. It was Lucas going back and redoing what he thought he got wrong. We may not like it, but it was still his to mess with. He wasn't doing anything malicious, he just wanted to do it, as he considered it, right.

And I'll never really criticize Lucas again. Truth is, if Han was supposed to shoot first, why does the guy who created both Greedo and Solo disagree with you?

"But it wasn't part of the original vision" Okay, fine, but editing is actually a key part of the process. Not just post-production, mind you, but in the writing process as well. Is your first draft always your final one?

"But it ruins Han's character" Does it though? It's .2 seconds of him /still/ shooting Greedo and Greedo still gets got.

"But the Midichlorians" Okay fine. They suck. You know what? it still makes exactly as much sense as anything else in this universe.

No one vision comes out fully-fledged. Lucas created a world we all still enjoy living in so much we can't shut the fuck up about it.

George Lucas didn't ruin anyone's childhood, our own hypercritical notion of media did. Lucas created a landscape hundreds of people have built on in thousands of stories and millions have imagined living in. He's a modern Tolkien, and not only that, he's a charitable dude at that. He doesn't care about the money, he only wants the money to create the stories, and the world, he wants. I respect the hell out of that. I wish he'd gotten more opportunities to do the projects he wanted. I bet they'd be almost unwatchable, but it'd at least make for a cerebral thursday afternoon.

And yeah. Fuck you. I do like the prequels. They're neat. Yes, all of them. Even Attack Of The Clones. I'm a monster, I know, but suck it. I like Obi-Wan's mullet-centric detective work.

[mondfahrt]

Questions About Art

In the last couple of weeks, you've probably seen a few twitter threads like these (or their re-posts on tumblr) about the "decline" of art and architecture. Now, these kinds of posts (and people like The Cultural Tutor especially) have a lot of fascist red flags that other people have pointed out much more eloquently than I ever could, but I'd like to give my own two cents about why this view on art, architecture and their history proposes a lot of problems but also some questions that are worth getting into.

Some of the problems I'll be talking about are directly from these twitter threads, some I saw in the comments of these threads, and some I've encountered in my daily life. I'm not saying these are all fascist! In fact, a lot could just be labelled as "things you learn about art history when you don't spend years studying it". This mindset and this kind of bias are, as you will see, very very old and there are reasons why we still struggle with them today.

I kind of want people to know about arguments I rarely see talked about in non-academic spaces. Diversify the public discourse, if you will. I know some of these things tend to get complicated but I've tried to keep it as simple as possible. But if you have any questions about any of this, please ask! I can talk about art all day every day.

Also, I'm not claiming to know everything. If nothing here seems to make sense to you, that's fine, too. I'd really like to know your opinion, though! And if I've made mistakes and you know better: Please tell me!

(I also really understand that engaging with these kinds of arguments is maybe kind of pointless. People will see and like and think what they will see and like and think. Art has always been devisive. But I love talking about art and I think I do have some perspective on this topic. And the discussion is kind of the point here. Also, if you read those threads on twitter, most comments are actually saying some good stuff. Not everything is mindblowingly wrong. I'm elaborating on some of it.)

Okay, let's get this thing going!

1. What is supreme?

There are several problems here: The choice of vocabulary is probably the least offensive. But this person presents their opinion (and it is simply that) as fact while assigning subjective values to the Pietá. What is extraordinary? What is beauty? Why is it surpreme? Is it because of the assumed value of marble, historically taken as a luxurious material when it isn't really any better than any other stone... Is in fact worse under certain circumstances because it really doesn't like getting wet... But I don't think this person wants to talk about that here. I think what they really mean is: It takes skill to make stone look like flesh or fabric.

Now, the problem with this is: It's a myth. Granted, we'll maybe have to leave Michelangelo out of it, because apparently he did do a lot of the work himself, but... a lot of artists did not. In fact, the artist as this unique genius working on his own, all by himself, is a narrative that's been pretty much established because of Michelangelo and the way art history has literally been built on top of his legacy. But most artists, before, during, and after Michelangelo's time, had whole workshops and teams of people working for and with them. We don't know a lot of medieval artists today because they didn't think it was important who had done the work. They shared their skills and time and resources to make and build and craft. Same goes for artists during the 17th century, because most of them still needed the help of craftspeople to make a bronze cast, for example. Sometimes we still can't decide if something is "by Leonardo da Vinci" or by one of his students or made in his workshop because sometimes an artist had an idea, drew a sketch and let other people do things like the background or details he didn't have the time for because he was busy inventing planes. And no one really cared because it was still from his workshop and having him paint the whole thing would've cost a lot more. Not only money but also time.

What we can see here, over time, is the development of the narrative of the artist as genius, and the devaluaziation of workshops and crafts in comparison to art.

2. What is an artist?

This is funny because idea, concept, and intellectual work in general are initially what seperated art and craft. The male artist as genius who creates something (the Pietá) out of nothing (a block of marble) is an important narrative! Saying that Jeff Koons' works are worse because he didn't do it himself is kind of ridiculous because it's nothing new. Artists have done this for centuries. And devaluing his work because it's only an idea/a concept is even funnier because that's one of the most important aspects of art in the early modern period.

For comparison: This is one of Jeff Koons' Balloon Dogs, mirror-polished stainless steel with transparent color coating (here in magenta), 121 x 143 x 45 inches (307.3 x 363.2 x 114.3 cm), made between 1994-2000.

Douglas Crimp says,

"The extraordinary status that has accrued to the work of art during the modern period is, in part, a consequence of the romantic myth of the artist as the most highly specialized, indeed unique producer. That this myth obscures the social division of labor was recognized by Minimal artists. Traditional sculpture's specialized craft and highly fetishized materials were opposed by Minimalism with the introduction of objects industrially fabricated of ordinary manufactured materials." (1)

Jeff Koons is not a Minimalist. Their works from the 1950s and 1960s looks more like this.

This is Carl Andre's 4 Square 4 Void, installation 2018, 12 unit hollow square on floor, 0.5 x 160 x 160 cm.

Minimalists like Andre intended to completely erase the hand of the artist by using materials that had to be very obviously made with machines. This is where another art myth comes in as well: "I could have done that." Yes, that's the point. Minimal art is supposed to let you reflect on the way we lift artists to higher standards. Why would you treat Andre's metal squares differently than the concrete floor their lying on? You're actually even invited to walk on these! To reflect the way you experience the room around you, with the artwork and your body in it... (The Minimalists had a whole thing going on relationships between art, space and viewer as a critique of the supposedly "neutral" gallery or museum space but that's a topic for another day.)

The Minimalists (Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd...) also did these high finishes like Koons, very shiny surfaces that show no traces of brushes or chisels. You're not supposed to think these have been done by one person. And if they're not done by a person but by a machine, or by a whole group of people working these machines, then who is the artist? What is an artist? And can anyone be an artist?

3. Is it art if you (don't) need to explain it?

They also wanted to make art accessible. Since the kind of art the Minimalists did was pretty much completely new and unheard of in the 1960s, no one understood it, which meant that everyone started on the same level. You're just supposed to feel their art, its position in the room and in relation to your body. Everyone can do that. No academic advantage. Some critics were furious about that.

Of course, this concept falls apart a bit when you think about art historians and critics engaging much more with art in general, talking to artists and other historians, knowing about materials etc. You'll never get a completely even playing field, if you ask me, but at least the Minimalists tried to do something.

In contrast: The twitter post above claims that the Pietá needs no explanation or context. But that's not exactly true, is it? Sure, you can appreciate it without knowing anything about it. Pain like that translates well in any case, I think. But being at least culturally Christian puts you miles ahead of everyone else already. Knowing that that's the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, who's lying in her arms, dead... otherwise these two people could be lovers, or siblings, or friends. It's also placed in a church, you can't really get close to it, which could make it hard to even see that the man in the woman's arms is dead, at first glance he could just be unconscious, even sleeping. Not having this context doesn't make this work less impressive, on a skill-level, but it does add some things.

Context matters.

Which takes me to one point in the discussion on twitter that actually makes me angry.

4. What is context?

The OP says that they don't know what to think about these sculptures. Maybe you don't either, that's completely fair! Let me add some context:

On the left: Veronica Ryan's Custard Apple (Annonaceae), Breadfruit (Moraceae), and Soursop (Annonaceae), all from 2021. Now, I had to research this but it was fairly easy. I just used Google. The titles suggest that these are fruit. The fact that they are the UK's first public sculpture dedicated to the Windrush generation makes me think that they're probably culturally and historically important to these people specifically. People from the Caribbean, where the artist was born and where these fruits are common, who migrated to the UK.

I like this anecdote from an article in iNews on the day the sculpture was unveiled in London:

"On a wet October morning, shoppers wheeling trolleys nodded in recognition as they passed the work. A mother fielded questions from her young daughter, identifying the soursop for her and explaining what it was as they walked away. As Ryan posed for photographers, a young man sped past, pointed at the marble sculpture and shouted “sugar-apple!” - “That’s right!” the artist shouted back, beaming." (2)

I know what the Pietá is depicting, I've learned about it from growing up as a Christian and studying art history. I had to google what a soursop was, but other people have grown up with them and look at this sculpture, already knowing what it means.

Context matters.

I also think it's important to know that this is the first public sculpture in the UK by a Black woman. And I love that Ryan says she wants these sculptures of fruits to be a part of the community, to bring people together like food tends to do, to remind people of good things, to give them a place to sit or rest or climb on.

The Pietá sits high and mighty, untouchable, holy, and that's for a reason, too. But I like that sculpture like Ryan's, made from marble and bronze just like so many sculptures from the Renaissance, can also be like this, public and warm.

I don't have to understand everything about it. I have never eaten a sugar-apple, or a breadfruit. This is not art made for me. It does not need to be. But I can still find something in it, if I open my mind, do a bit of research, and don't expect everything to be spelled out for me.

Now, the sculpture on the right is a bit more complicated: It's Heather Phillipson's THE END, 2020, and it was placed in Trafalgar Square, London, on the so-called Fourth Plinth. The Fourth Plinth is a public art project intended to diversify the monuments in London. The other three plinths on Trafalgar Square all carry statues of white British men (two generals and one king). The fourth plinth was supposed to carry another general but the funds ran out and it remained empty until the 1990s, when it was decided that it would instead show different works of contemporary art temporarily, specifically commissioned for this place. Phillipson's work is supposed to look playful, joyful, even tasty, but with a darker twist. The drone on top of the whipped cream sculpture is recording a live feed of Trafalgar Square, a commentary on surveillance in public spaces, even - or especially - if those public spaces are places for people to come together and enjoy life and culture. The sculpture is not taking itself very seriously, just as it is poking fun at the seriousness of other (public) art, like the generals and kings surrounding it, or the paintings in the National Gallery behind it, but it's also political. Who does a public square belong to? Do we know who's watching us at any given moment? But also: Who are we watching? Everyone can watch the sculpture's live feed, all the people on the square, but also every statue of a dead white man there.

5. Do you need to be told this is art?

At this point, I do think OP is arguing in bad faith here. I'm not saying you have to like any of these artworks. Or that you have to understand them immediately, or get anything out of them. But they are so much more than just "shock factor". Actually, most of modern, postmodern and contemporary art is about so much more than shock factor, especially public sculptures. I've only talked about those here because the OP on twitter only talked about those but it's also my field of study. And I still needed to research a lot to write this, so I don't expect anyone to understand anything immediately. But when it comes to art, I urge people to keep an open mind. Most artworks are much more meaningful than you'd expect and I bet I could actually tell you a lot about Michelangelo's Pietá you didn't know that would change its interpretation to you.

Here are a few just for fun:

This is the only statue by Michelangelo with a signature. We're not sure why exactly that is. Because he saw this as a great work and was proud of himself? Or because he was only at the beginning of his career when he made it and needed to build a reputation?

Mary looks much too young in this to have an adult son. It's an anachronism that's maybe pointing towards her later ascension. Or towards some kind of "beautiful people are moral and good" metaphor that was very prominent during the Renaissance. Or maybe Michelangelo just didn't want to make an older woman.

This work is a masterpiece of composition: You don't even realise that Mary is much larger than Jesus because she's sitting and because her dress is so voluminous. But it's also only brilliant when you're looking at it from the front. It's placed in a church, in front of a wall, so you can't even see behind it. That means, Michelangelo didn't need to do a full piece that's amazing and interesting from all sides - which is, incidentally, a factor that becomes very popular during the Late Renaissance.

I think that last point is interesting because sculptures like those by Phillipson and Ryan do need to be interesting from all sides, since their placed in an open space. They need to do something with the space around them, not just with one wall in a church.

These sculptures are not random. Not even when you don't know what the artists wanted to do with them. If you get something else out of THE END or Custard Apple, that's fine! That's not random, that's just one way to look at art, it's interaction, it's dialogue.

6. What is the conceptual foundation of art?

We can disagree on this but I don't think the "conceptual foundation of modern art" is to question accepted standards of what art can be. (Setting aside that OP is most likely mixing up modern and contemporary art here.) There are hundreds of movements, styles, and theories in art. Andre, Koons, Phillipson and Ryan are just four artists out of thousands, and each one wants to do something different with their art. Yes, some of them want to question what art can be. Some want to question the assumed neutrality of the gallery. Some want us to think about our bodies in space. Some want to make political statements about surveillance. Some want to see their heritage represented in public.

Some of my favourite artists want to make you think about life and death and all the love we share in between. How we interact with people daily. Or how the world around us keeps moving and changing. Some want to make statements about gender and bodies, or the environment, or colonialism, or capitalism. Some want you to see all the shadows on a white canvas. Some just really like a certain shade of blue.

Art can be so many different things. I love Medieval art, and Renaissance art, and art from the Enlightenment... (I even have friends who study these periods in art history!) No work of art, no period in art history, is superior to another.

OP of the thread - as well as commenters like Mike Brook - assume that contemporary art is only one thing. They argue that idea and concept and meaning trump everything in contemporary art, that form has become meaningless. That's true for some artworks, concept art in particular, or art that can be reproduced again and again. Looking down at that art, criticizing it as meaningless or only interesting because of its shock factor, misses the point, though. And it is - and this is important - incredibly elitist.

7. What is art?

This is an argument we've had since the beginnings of art history - when one of Michelangelo's friends, Giorgio Vasari, published biographies of artists, likening them to nobles and popes and highlighting their unique skills in order to make them out to be geniuses. That meant, in turn, that you couldn't simply become an artist, but that you were born to be one.

Vasari had such an influence on art history - he's actually said to be the "father of art history" - that we still have to unravel these narratives today. Because when Vasari wrote these biographies, these stories, he only included the (in his opinion) greatest artists of all, with Michelangelo coming out on top. He's the reason we have an art historic canon, a set of artists who are considered important and great and worthy of study and admiration and remembrance. Of course, Vasari mostly included Italian artists because most art from north of the Alps was not as great. And anyone before Michelangelo couldn't be as great as Michelangelo because you needed to show progress, that art was moving forward, becoming better and better. Art made by women was always depicted as being less good than that made by men. And so on, and so forth...

The same narrative goes for understanding art. There are several instances throughout art history when people (mostly old white men) cried about the supposed "end of art". It happened with the Impressionists, with the Dadaists, with the Minimalists, with concept art and installation art and so on.

In 1967, art critic Michael Fried published an essay called "Art and Objecthood" in which he criticized Minimal art (especially in comparison to Modernist art) as being literal and theatrical. It is one of the most cited essays on contemporary art in recent decades. You might ask yourself, what about Carl Andre's metal plates on the floor could be theatrical? Literal can be understood: They are literally metal squares on the floor. They don't pretend to be anything else, like how Michelangelo's marble pretends to be Jesus, or how Ryan's bronze pretends to be fruit. In this way, they can be understood by everyone. You don't have to have read the Bible or been to the Caribbean to "understand" a metal square. You are simply supposed to experience your body in relation to it. That also means that the artwork speaks to every person differently and individually, because no one can experience art out of any body other than their own.

"Theatricality" to Fried means superficiality, deception, and emptiness of meaning. If a work of art doesn't claim to be anything else than what it is, it's superficial. If anyone can find different, individual meaning in a work of art, no one can really know what the artist wants to say, so it's deceptive. And if the artist doesn't care about universal meaning being found in their work, it must be meaningless.

Christa Noel Robbins says on Fried's essay:

In catering to each viewer in their turn, the ability of the work of art to transcend atomized taste and enter into something like a community of meaning making is foreclosed. Absent that community, Fried has long argued, a work of art has no real meaning; it is particularized, isolating the viewer in their own individuated field of experience. (3)

If a work of art doesn't transcend to give us some higher meaning, a meaning that's the same for everyone, is it art? Or is it an object?

That's basically what people who question any and all contemporary art, who ask "what is an artist?", have problems with. They don't want to see that a sculpture is just a block of marble, no matter the form. The form doesn't make it any less a block of marble, something very normal, and earthly, and not "supreme" at all. And not everyone will find (or needs to find) higher meaning in that block. Only if someone does find higher meaning in it, does it become art at all - Michelangelo's sculpture needs the viewer, just like the metal squares need the viewer to make them into art. Into more than objects. But this process is extremely subjective, for Michelangelo just as much as for Andre or Ryan.

"Anything can be art," complains The Cultural Tutor in another tweet. But that's not the real problem they have. The problem is: If anything can be art, and I don't like some of that art and I don't even think it's art, who's to say that Michelangelo's Pietá is art? If I can question contemporary art, isn't everything else in danger to be questioned as well?

(1) Douglas Crimp: "Serra's Public Sculpture", in: Rosalind Krauss (ed.): Richard Serra/Sculpture, New York 1986, pp. 40-56, p. 44. (2) Hettie Judah: "Veronica Ryan’s celebratory giant fruit are a lesson in how to do public sculpture well", in: iNews, 10/01/2021, URL: https://inews.co.uk/culture/arts/veronica-ryan-windrush-monument-fruit-sculpture-hackney-london-review-1227786. (3) Christa Noel Robinson: "The Sensibility of Michael Fried", in: Criticism 60:4 (2018), pp. 429-454, p. 432.

[nobodyfamousposts]

How do you manage to write stories with Adrien? I mean, you can play comic roles, with real development or even Adrienette as well. That Guy made Adrien so unsympathetic to me that I gave up on an old project and I doubt I'll be able to write Adrienette again. And I think the worst thing is that I can write Chloe just fine, and maybe Lila thanks to Scarlet Lady, but I have blocks with Adrien. Do you have any techniques to help?

Unless I'm salting him, I look at Adrien as a concept instead of as the intended paragon canon portrays him as. My Adrien salt is less against him personally and more against how he is in that canon.

So if I remove him from that canon and the specific lens it views him with or the "protections" it gives him from any sort of fault as well as the salt I'd hold for him because of those things, what would I have?

He's a kid who has been isolated and didn't really have friends or know what healthy friends were until starting school. Wants affection. Likes strong women. Is apparently capable of ordering Camembert cheese and carrying it on his person with no questions. Was super excited to be a superhero and had his magical girl transformation planned out before his first transformation.

As such, I'd imagine him as a dork. Socially awkward. Emotional. Good heart and good intentions but not always aware of consequences or how his actions might appear to or affect others (which, to be fair, is common in teenagers). Somewhat self-righteous and caught up in his own perceptions of right and wrong in the immediate sense of how he thinks people should act that he fails to take in the context or reasons behind why they don't. But ultimately still learning and growing. This is the core aspect of Adrien I used for Missing, BURN THE WITCH, Miracle Queen Aftermath, and the Dolls AU.

From there, other aspects and options can appear. A more vocal and sassy Adrien capable of standing up for himself and making his feelings known in my crack series (especially the Movie Trailer), Chloe's Lament, and BURN THE WITCH. A more doting and paternal Adrien who very much wants to care for and love someone even if he doesn't fully understand how in the Dolls AU and Mominette AU. And even a creepy creepy Adrien who wants to protect and care for people but in a less personal-boundaries-respecting and more violent-but-not-fully-yandere way in the Future Tense and HIVE MINDED stories.

My suggestion would be to look at Adrien as a character and note the parts that are just him and who he is as a person. Without Ladybug and his crush on her. Without his dad and his sad moments. Without the current narrative using him as the moral mouthpiece or otherwise pushing his way on everything. Who is Adrien and who is he to you? Not necessarily who you want him to be, but who he simply is without all of the canon filters?

Against what the Adrien stans seem to want to claim, I truly believe that these versions of Adrien I've created aren't unrealistic or completely against his character. Adrien isn't some poor defenseless woobie who is incapable of doing anything for himself. He also isn't the super strong super badass whom everyone would be lost without. He is a somewhat idealistic and passive person who needs to grow and be able to choose and act for himself without relying on others or expecting others to give in and go along with his wants and beliefs in every situation. He is a new kid in a new situation with new people and plenty of things to learn.

And there is a heck of a lot of story writing potential with that.