#Is a delicate line

[an-established-butt-dent]

Solas x Lavellan

Dragon age the Veilguard

Tel banal, ara'ma

It won’t be terrible if you’re with me.

Available as print here.

[stromblessed]

Mizu, femininity, and fallen sparrows

In my last post about Mizu and Akemi, I feel like I came across as overly critical of Mizu given that Mizu is a woman who - in her own words - has to live as a man in order to go down the path of revenge.

If she is ever discovered to be female by the wrong person, she will not only be unable to complete her quest, but there's a good chance that she'll be arrested or killed.

So it makes complete sense for Mizu to distance herself as much as possible from any behavior that she feels like would make someone question her sex.

I felt so indignant toward Mizu on my first couple watchthroughs for this moment. Why couldn't Mizu bribe the woman and her child's way into the city too? If Mizu is presenting as a man, couldn't she claim to be the woman's escort?

However, this moment makes things pretty clear. Mizu knows all too well the plight of women in her society. She knows it so well that she cannot risk ever finding herself back in their position again. She helps in what little way she can - without drawing attention to herself.

Mizu is not a hero and she is not one to make of herself a martyr - she will not set herself on fire to keep others warm. There's room to argue that Mizu shouldn't prioritize her quest over people's lives, but given the collateral damage Mizu can live with in almost every episode of season 1, Mizu is simply not operating under that kind of morality at this point. ("You don't know what I've done to reach you," Mizu tells Fowler.)

And while I still feel like Mizu has an obvious and established blind spot when it comes to Akemi because of their differences in station, such that Mizu's judgment of Akemi and actions in episode 5 are the result of prejudice rather than the result of Mizu's caution, I also want to establish that Mizu is just as caged as Akemi is, despite her technically having more freedom while living as a man.

Mizu can hide her mixed race identity some of the time, and she can hide her sex almost all of the time, but being able to operate outside of her society's strict rules for women does not mean she cannot see their plight.

It does not mean she doesn't hurt for them.

Back to Mizu and collateral damage, remember that sparrow?

While Mizu is breaking into Boss Hamata's manse, she gets startled by a bird and kills it on reflex. She then cradles it in her hands - much more tenderly than we've seen Mizu treat almost anything up to this point in the season:

She then puts it in its nest, with its unhatched eggs. Almost like she's trying to make the death look natural. Or like an accident.

You see where I'm going with this.

When Mizu kills Kinuyo, Mizu lingers in the moment, holding the body tenderly:

And btw a lot of stuff about this show hit me hard, but this remains the biggest gut punch of them all for me, Mizu holding that poor girl's body close, GOD

When Mizu arranges the "scene of the crime," Kinuyo's body is delicate, birdlike. And Mizu is so shaken afterward that she gets sloppy. She's horrified at this kill to the point that she can't bring herself to take another innocent life - the boy who rats her out.

MIZU'S ONE MOMENT OF SOFTNESS AND MERCY, COMING ON THE HEELS OF HER NEEDING TO KILL A GIRL TO SPARE HER THE WORST FATE THAT THIS RIGID SOCIETY HAS TO OFFER WOMEN, AND TO SPARE A BROTHEL FULL OF INNOCENT WOMEN WHO ARE THE CASTOFFS OF SOCIETY, NEARLY RESULTS IN ALL OF THEIR DEATHS

No wonder Mizu is as stoic and cold as she is.

And no wonder Mizu has no patience for Akemi whatsoever right before the terrible reveal and the fight breaks out:

Speaking of Akemi - guess who else is compared to a bird!

The plumage is more colorful, a bit flashier. But a bird is a bird.

And, uh

Yeah.

I like to think that Mizu killing the sparrow is not only foreshadowing for what she must do to Kinuyo, but is also a representation of the choice she makes on Akemi's behalf. She decides to cage the bird because she believes the bird is "better off." Better off caged than... dead.

But because Mizu doesn't know Akemi or her situation, she of course doesn't realize that the bird is fated to die if it is caged and sent back home.

Mizu is clearly not happy, or pleased, or satisfied by allowing Akemi to be dragged back to her father:

But softness and mercy haven't gotten Mizu anywhere good, recently.

There is so much tragedy layered into Mizu's character, and it includes the things she has to witness and the choices she makes - or believes she has to make - involving women, when she herself can skirt around a lot of what her society throws at women. Although, I do believe that it comes at the cost of a part of Mizu's soul.

After all, I'm gonna be haunted for the rest of this show by Mizu's very first prayer in episode 1:

"LET" her die. Because as Ringo points out, she doesn't "know how" to die.

Kind of like another bird in this show:

[shanastoryteller]

Shana, your tags on this post ...I need to know more! What exactly was the plan for Supernatural season 3 if it hasn't been for the writer's strike??? And how haven't I heard about this already?? I need the deets!

i'm so glad you asked :)

the original plan for season 3 was for sam to descend into using his demon powers to get dean out of the deal, and for dean to never go to hell. then the writers strike happened, the season got cut from 22 eps to 16, with only 4 after the strike, and that wasn't enough time to establish sam's spiral and powers, so changed the ending. it's on the wiki and there are some articles around about it

this was, in my opinion, the worst fucking decision they could make

it ruined the characters in a lot of ways and really unbalanced everything in a way the show never recovered from

the thing is that this arc is so well set up!

literally at the end of season 2 we get

"You're my big brother, there's nothing I wouldn't do for you. And I don't care, I'm going to get you out of this. I'm going to save your ass for a change."

sam has evaded azazel's every attempt to corrupt him. his shitty home life, all the demons he's exposed sam to, killing jessica, taking away his father, putting him in a literal life or death hunger games scenario. each time sam refuses to play ball

(sam's incorruptibility is what makes him qualified to be king of hell, but that's a different post)

he's the moral compass between him and dean. always has been. there is nothing in sam's messed up, twisted life that has pushed him pass mercy

but dean could do it. there's nothing sam wouldn't do for his big brother

john told dean that he had to either save sam or kill him. except he's never needed to save sam, because it's literally always sam making the measured, compassionate, merciful call. he's the one holding dean back, not the other way around

and sam straining towards darkness for the first time, for dean, would kill him. we'll come back to this

mystery spot, as an episode, is actually pointless if the plan was for dean to go to hell. because sam's sneak peek into what his life is like after dean doesn't do anything. i love this ep, but it's narratively pointless now

however

with the og plan, mystery spot is the turning point. it not only tells sam how miserable he'll be after dean is gone, but it also establishes what he's willing to do to get him back - pretty much anything. it's not theoretical pain, it's not theoretical grief. mystery spot is the thing that pushes sam towards being hard, away from the moral sweetness he's embodied for the past two and half seasons.

the next ep, jus in bello, shows this. sam is considering doing the terrible thing. he's now capable of considering the terrible thing in a way he wasn't before mystery spot. this is when his descent starts, when sam decides he's willing to trade his humanity for his brother's life

and then the writer's strike happened

right when it's getting good, right when sam's arc is ramping up, we lose it. and instead of picking it back up, pushing dean's deal to next season and giving it the weight it deserves, they say fuck it, and send dean to hell

but this fucks it all up. we have sam's "descent" with ruby and demon blood. except not really because he's not even hurting anyone. and dean's back, but not because of sam. sam didn't save him

this fucks it all up

because deans anger and fear and desire to save sam should have been tempered with the knowledge that he did that to save dean's life. that once more someone dean loves has made a terrible sacrifice for him, which he can't stand, which he hates. he has the self esteem of a gnat and the best people he knows keep destroying themselves for his benefit

i think the og build up was sam strengthening his powers to kill lilith, doing it, and then releasing lucifer at the end of s3. sam unwittingly starting the apocolypse to save his brother (does he regret it, dean wonders. it would be easier if he did)

and now everything is shit and dean's drowning but here and his brother has turned himself into something that's not unlike the kid dean loves so much it almost killed him, but not exactly the same. and now he understands john, because this is the sam that dean has to either save or kill, except he could never kill him. he loves him (and how can he kill sam for doing this when it's dean's fault, when dean made the deal that doomed his brother when all he wanted was to save him)

this is the flip that the show has been building towards. dean having to be the moral center for his brother for once. dean being the one saved. dean finally having to face his father's words and deciding once and for all if he's john's son or sam's brother

but instead dean goes to hell. and he's no one moral's center. because he broke in hell, he tortured people and he enjoyed it. they ruined dean with this. because instead of fighting and growing from his violence, they push him into it, and then they call him a righteous man. dean was the one harming people, he's the one that descended into darkness, not sam. sam and his demon blood had still only been trying to good, and in the end did do good, far more than anything dean did in hell, or has done since. his moral outrage, his anger, his disgust towards sam isn't only wildly out of character, it's hypocritical as hell. sam remains the moral, compassionate one, even through this. it never slides to dean. neither of them are really forced to grow or change, only to become twisted into each other in ways that hurt them both

this should have been the story of what sam would do to save his brother (anything) and what dean would do to save his brother (anything)

they should have saved each other

[paradoxbeta]

more iterators

[ndostairlyrium]

Template

This was too cute, I couldn't miss the chance ;; also I like this low effort painterly style, immediacy is fun!

[wigglebox]

Suptober [Extended] - Day 24 || Smoke

[fungh0u1]

You're the weakest person there is, so I'm told.

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

One day I’m going to finish that essay or whatever it was in my drafts that’s about the themes of womanhood/relationships/thirtysomething stuff and TTPD but since part of this discussion has been revived on the dash but also it’s Saturday so this won’t ruffle as many feathers, I think one thing that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle in the conversation about the muses and stories in the lyrics is just why the recurring theme of the broken dreams pops up all over the album, and why they permeate the discussion of both muses, if not *all* the muses in the album.

Not to project things on Taylor, but it feels pretty clear to me* that the dreams she’s talking about specifically are about having a family, and that is the through line in the album, and why the successive blows devastated her. (*I don’t want to presume that anyone else feels this way and this is just my interpretation etc.)

The suburban gothic allegory in Fortnight depicting a miserable, lonely marriage. The ring on the ring finger in TTPD making her explode with joy because it was a shorthand for lifelong commitment. “He saw forever so he smashed it up” in My Boy. “I’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free” and dying on the sacrificial altar in So Long London. Marrying her wild boy in But Daddy. “Get the matches, toss the ashes off the ledge” in Fresh Out the Slammer (as in, she burned her life down). “You shit-talked me under the table talking rings and talking cradles” in loml. “The deflation of our dreaming leaving me bereft and reeling” in How Did It End. “Promises ocean deep and never to keep” in Peter. The allusion in The Manuscript that the man in question made her think he was in it for the potential of a serious commitment only for her to feel used when he moved on. And there are probably more examples I’m not thinking of off the top of my head here.

But what I’m trying to get at delicately is that from what she’s put down in TTPD, as well as what she’s put down in previous albums (“give you my wild, give you my child,” Paper Rings, Lover, renegade, YLM, etc.) building a life and a family with this person (Joe) was not only something she wanted, but seemingly deliberately planning and working towards. So in the death throes of the relationship, her grief was not just about things like losing someone she once loved, the breakdown of this relationship that was once comforting to her, what she gave up to make their life work, etc. but about this important thing she had dreamed of and what she seemed to feel was on the horizon. What I think I’m trying to say is that it had likely shifted at some point (even just based on the album pipeline) from a hypothetical “one day we’ll have ten kids and teach them how to dream” thing you wonder about with a partner to something that felt a lot more… tangible. (Again trying to be sensitive in my word choice/not project or assume things etc.)

I don’t want to make any accusations or assumptions on main, but I think those kind of life plans feeling within reach not only makes it understandable as to why someone would stay in a relationship whose cracks were turning into fault lines, but on the flip side why giving up on something that felt like it was on their doorstep would be so wholly devastating.

But it’s also why what happened in the two successive relationships *was* so devastating in the songs on the album, and why the Matty thing specifically was so twisted. He’d reentered her life and he’d insinuated himself back into her circle and gained her confidence which in turn led her to confide things in him (the “hostile takeovers” of it all, the whole bridge of The Smallest Man with its honey pot spy mission imagery in which like a mark he sweet talked her into sharing her most vulnerable, compromising “secrets” only to then turn it around to use her and ghost her like a trained operative). And given the way the family thing appears in both presumed storylines, it’s again because Muse #2 used the info gleaned about the life with Muse #1 to sell her a con about an alternate path to what she was mourning so deeply. (And why it’s such an unconscionable act because it’s manipulation, at least going by her own words about her experience of it. It’s as cavalier as the organ donor line in The Manuscript, with the same effect.)

The shittalking about rings and cradles is both of them (if not all of them) because in all cases, they ended up raising her hopes only to not plan on following through. One because he maybe couldn’t commit, one because maybe he was never serious about it. (And the one who did it first who was both 🥴.)

If I had to guess (because I am not Taylor so I will obviously never know any of this for sure besides picking up context clues), the dream was like a carrot dangling in her mind, feeling like this is what the “agony” to quote another one of her songs was for — like, things may be hard, but life is hard, and at least they were building towards *something* she felt they both wanted. And as that dream slipped through her fingers, it created a cascading series of events that crippled her emotionally for a time. So when she mourns that life in her songs, it’s almost like it’s the same dream, just in shifting contexts. The conman selling her dream back to her is comforting at first, but hits doubly hard and leaves her broke when it disappears.

The story throughout the muses on the album isn’t “she jumps to the person who promises her these things,” it’s that it’s a whole life she’s built that crumbles under the weight of reality knocking at the door and a foundation that shifts until it disintegrates. And losing that foundation and the dreams built upon it leaves her searching for answers in the wreckage — and looking elsewhere for clarity for a time. And it’s why it’s so hard to remove one muse from the other (or again, all of them), because that central driving force is used by each of them in different ways to build her up and take her down. And why working through the pain of one situation bleeds into that of another.

It’s hard to delve into this more without crossing boundaries or whatever, but it’s just such a palpable open wound in the album, but also why working through the pain in different contexts on TTPD brings to light all these different kinds of hurt but also the emotions that go along with them.

Anyway. That other essay will write itself at some point idk.

[makotonaegiunderstander]

something I’ve been thinking abt is how many people think Makoto is immune to despair. I don’t think he is. I think becoming the ultimate Hope was BECAUSE he felt despair. He wouldn’t have fully reached that point without Junko. Makoto becoming such a beacon was his last attempt to avoid completely falling and it wasn’t because he didn’t feel despair, it was because he was too damn stubborn to allow everything to go to waste and he refused to sacrifice his beliefs for someone else’s. His inner monologue tells me he DID experience the same new low the other suvivors did in the final trial, but at the point where he had the choice to give up and die, he looked at the others and he looked at Junko and he couldn’t allow it to happen, not out of self preservation, but because the idea that Junko would have control over their lives made him FURIOUS. and that utter refusal to die kicked in, wether luck or otherwise, and he made the concious effort for one last push while something in him was breaking. He had to be broken in order for the Ultimate Hope to come through so aggressively, bc it could only exist in the face of the Ultimate Despair. He snapped the same way she did, but in the other direction. In what could have been his final moments he chose to embody everything Junko wasn’t, and every single optimistic and luck fueled ideal in him suddenly charged forward and pushed him. It was a combination of the final straw and a choice. Makoto isn’t immune to feeling despair, he’s just too stubborn to fall into it of his own volition. I think that’s why I like that scene in DR3 so much. People were SO SHOCKED Makoto actually fell for the tape, that he actually became despair for a moment. I saw people getting mad or disappointed, saying it was pathetic and Makoto seemed to fall from some sort of pedestal for them. Honestly part of me wonders if that sort of mentality, which clearly people had in universe, affected Makoto a bit. Like he started to see himself as less of a person, subconsciously. Prompting him to take more risks, less self preservation, act way more bold. It seems he has to be reminded a lot not to put himself in danger by his friends, to not do something too reckless. All over the place I would see in regards to that scene either this frivolous ‘oh this was just angst drama with no meaning behind it’ or ‘he can do better than that. he’s so weak’ or ‘come on, there’s no way he’d fall into despair, he’s the Ultimate Hope!’ This kind of mentality, which was kind of ironic considering Ryota was there the entire time saying the same thing and treating Makoto the same way. Like Makoto was superhuman. Like Makoto didn’t feel despair the same way ‘normal people’ did. In a way that was also how Munakata saw Makoto. Makoto stopped being a PERSON to the world when he became Ultimate Hope, he became a concept, a belief system, much the same way Junko ascended beyond herself. But the difference is that treating Makoto that way is the opposite of the reason Makoto became such a representative for hope. He wasn’t doing something no one else could. He was doing something everyone had the chance to, he just… was a little more optimistic, a little more stubborn, a little more ‘gung-ho’ about things. He just took the lead where no one else did, where no one else knew they even COULD in the face of Junko’s unstoppable force. She had overcome the biggest threats and obstacles in the world, what could one person do? And the answer Makoto found was, anything. Everything. It doesn’t all rest on Makoto, he’s just the one that was inspired to try to do what seemed like the impossible. But as evidenced by the change in his friends after that trial, it’s clearly not something only Makoto is capable of. The others pulled out of despair thanks to Makoto, but it was their choice to do so.

“But… this world is so huge, and we’re so small. What can we do…? No, we can probably do anything. Yeah! We can do anything!”

[frostbitebakery]

Last Line Challenge

Rules: in a new post, show the last line you wrote (or drew) and tag as many people as there are words (or as many as you feel like). 

I got tagged by!! @chiliger @marbled-polecat and @cacodaemonia !!! (last week)

I’m working like mad on May the Whump be with you and I’ve been Undecided. Do I go big waterlogged eyes or Defiant Sassy Bitch? And I realized, he contains multitudes, so both. Last line was making the eyebrow angy.

No pressure tags: @elismor @threebea @dontbelasagnax @omaano @lothcatthree @anstarwar @foreverchangingfandomsao3 @forloveofcodywan @bluemaskedkarma @snowywinterevenings @tired-bshocked @happybean17

All pressure tags: @elwenyere

[silkjade]

‘Rose, oh roses, grant me my wish. Blooming from the stone, the Golden Rose sang to me.’

“An exiled scholar once cultivated these roses specifically to survive the desert.…but something so special should be regarded alongside someone worthy of its beauty. Delicate, yet strong. For your personal archives….”

“personal archives” because my s/i is an archivist at the akademiya, and now here it is in our teapot bedroom muahaha

[jxsterr]

let me just…….

[itspileofgoodthings]

my romantic self-esteem is just absolutely rock-solid. for whatever reason!

[ririsasy]

Who wants to hold this hand?

May I?

[marypsue]

>checks care tag >"hand wash cold or dry clean ONLY!!!" >checks fibre content tag >"100% plastic! :) :) :)"

[shippymerch]

Hi y’all I know I haven’t been here in forever but is anyone ready for a Shizaya merch reveal??

✨ Ta-Da ✨

I offer you a manu video of the Psyche/Delic mini CD charms I got made 🤩

I’ve been pretty quiet on socmed while working on multiple projects, and this is one of them! It’ll still be a wait for these babies to reach me, but I’m vibrating with anticipation to have them in my hands 🤲 They’re so smol & I think they came out pretty cute. The backside design is my take on the portable record player Delic carries:

These mini CDs are 1 of 3 Shizaya merch items I have in production right now. The others are not as far along yet but please do stay tuned 👀