#Narrative mirrors

[bisquid]

At some point Aragorn meets Jon and is like 'oh look a spiritual twin, allow me to buy you a drink and help troubleshoot Logistics'

Aragorn, 87, So Fucking Done: okay so you probably know this, being like 40, but teenagers, like hobbits, do not possess survival instincts unless Forced To By The Narrative

Jon: I'm seventeen

Aragorn: you're WHAT

[notbecauseofvictories]

I'm re-reading the Discworld series for reasons, and honestly the most relatable part of reading these as an adult is how many of the protagonists start out being tired, used to their little routine and vaguely disgruntled by the interruption of the Plot. Sam Vimes wants to lie drunk in a gutter and absolutely doesn't want to be arresting dragons. Rincewind is yanked into every situation he's ever encountered, though he'd much rather be lying in a gutter too. (Minus the alcohol. Plus regretting everything he's ever done said witnessed or even heard about fourth-hand in his whole life.) Granny Weatherwax is deeply suspicious of foreign parts and that includes the next town over; Nanny has leaned into the armor of "nothing ever happens to jolly grannies who terrorize their daughters-in-law and make Saucy Jokes"

Only the young people don't seem to have picked up on this---and that's fortunate, because someone has to run around making things happen, if only so Vimes and Granny and Rincewind have a reason to get up (complaining bitterly the whole time) and put it all to rights. Without Carrot, Margrat, Eric, etc. these characters don't have that reason; they're likely to stay in the metaphorical gutter and keep wondering where it all went wrong or why anything has to change.

............well, that's not quite true. You get the sense that Vetinari knows how much certain people hate the Plot. And as the person sitting behind the metaphorical lighting board of Ankh-Morpork, he takes no small pleasure in forcing the Plot-haters specifically to stand up, and say some lines.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

None of our hands are clean

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[bacchuschucklefuck]

she turns, makes direct eye contact with you, smiles,

[whatisamildopinion]

Kyoto- Phoebe Bridgers

Pro-tip: don't think too long about how Moonshine and Bev have ouroboros arcs with family members and devils and saving the world at great personal cost. Don't think about it too hard. I definitely haven't (lying)

[whetstonefires]

Thinking about the parallels set up between Wei Wuxian and Mo Xuanyu, and how actually most of them are oddly specious.

The sketch of the backstory lines up, but on close examination they're mirror images.

Wei Wuxian wasn't kicked out of his sect, he left it. Wei Wuxian didn't hate the house he grew up in, he loved it, and getting the people there killed was the absolute last purpose for which his dark powers were ever intended.

Jiang Cheng was no Mo Ziyuan--his jealousy was a complicated thing all twisted up with love, and while he would lash out at Wei Wuxian both as a casual means of shit communication and more damagingly in moments of high tension, he had neither the desire nor the ability to bully him, and in general respected his boundaries almost too well.

When Wei Wuxian destroyed himself about Jiang Cheng, it was to give him cultivation, and protect his life and happiness. He would never have killed him.

Madam Yu was a domineering aunt-like figure, who hated Wei Wuxian for reasons of reputation, and because she had resented his dead mother, but she crucially did not have the power to actually disrupt his lifestyle to any significant extent.

Mo Xuanyu was shut up in a small room to rot; Wei Wuxian didn't even attend classes unless he wanted to. Mo Xuanyu was weak and disliked; Wei Wuxian was brilliant and popular.

Mo Xuanyu's uncle is a cipher of a figure, without character or agency, a nonentity who is resented to death apparently mostly for what he didn't do; in theory he is the master of the house, but he certainly never protected his wife and son's punching bag from them.

And this is what got me thinking along this track: because people keep interpreting Jiang Fengmian as this, as exactly like Mo Xuanyu's nameless uncle, a nonentity who lets his wife make all the decisions, and is contemptible therefore.

He shows up in fic characterized this way all the time, handled narratively as a gap rather than a person, an absence where there should have been a parent, and it's...totally inaccurate? The man only has a few scenes but the things that are most firmly established about him are:

he regularly goes out of his way to protect Wei Wuxian

he's extremely fond of Wei Wuxian

he cares a lot about ethical behavior

he's conflict-avoidant and gentle

he can and will overrule Yu Ziyuan when he's made up his mind, and there's nothing she can do about it

his communication skills are mediocre at best

he doesn't understand jiang cheng

he has a dumb sense of humor

Now almost none of this made it into cql besides point 4 and maybe 6, 5 is technically there but buried by the cinematic framing, so I totally get why the fandom on the whole struggles to characterize him well, and it's easier to write him off.

But it keeps bugging me to see him and Yu Ziyuan squashed into the mold of the Mo, because not only is that boring and reductive and kind-of-missing-the-point, it's like. Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng's characterization suffers a lot when you alter the environment and take away the influence exerted by their shared father figure.

Jiang Fengmian was Wei Wuxian's primary adult role model and it shows.

Jiang Cheng's relationship to his own sense of ethics is fraught because 'teaching him good ethics' was his dad's number one parenting goal, but they misunderstood each other so badly (partly because Yu Ziyuan kept loudly misinterpreting them to each other, which is so realistic I can't get over it, that's exactly how it works good lord) that Jiang Cheng has a direct association between the concept of 'doing the right thing even when it's hard' and a feeling of personal inadequacy.

The fact that Wei Wuxian got their dad-person's approval for being exactly himself and Jiang Cheng not only couldn't do that, he couldn't even get that same level of approval when he really pushed himself to rise to expectations, because Jiang Fengmian did not intend that warmth as a 'reward,' and so never realized he was withholding it, and therefore misunderstood Jiang Cheng's visible jealousy as a dangerous sense of personal entitlement that had to be carefully restrained, which reinforced his distrust of Jiang-Cheng-the-person and fed into a shitty loop where they were less and less able to relate to one another--that's fantastic. That's so human! I love it so much.

Both their failures are their own but at the same time it would never have gotten so bad if Yu Ziyuan hadn't been interjecting herself in there, in the middle of their relationship, fucking it up. That's family, baby.

I would ofc like if there was more fic engaging with the subtleties of all this because it's so good, mxtx did such elegant work here and it is not sufficiently appreciated. But it's the kind of thing that's hard to write good fic about; I am struggling with it myself.

So mostly I wish there was just more fic that didn't impose Mo Xuanyu's cliche angst backstory on Wei Wuxian, who has a whole different thing going on.

[justcallme-ange]

Got some feelings about c!Dream and his whole arc. So I’m making it everyone else's problem XD

The Beginning

The End (Wishful)

Also for those that like Angst: The End (Actual)

[casually-eat-my-soul]

Don’t think about the fact that’s it’s implied stiles has his mother’s eyes. That every time he looks himself in the mirror he sees her eyes looking back at him. That when he looks at himself with deep hatred he sees his mother calling him a monster. He sees her eyes as she tries to kill him. Somedays that’s all he can see. So he avoids looking at himself in the mirror.

Don’t think about seeing void with his mother eyes, eyes that once again hold violence.

Don’t think about stiles holding head in hands. Thinking that the only thing his body has left of his mother is his eyes. That maybe if he gets rid of them, then his father would be able to look at him again.

Slowly digging his nails through the skin above his eyes. Thinking about gouging his eyes out and giving them to his dad. But not being able to do it but using the action to ground himself. Repeating it again and again and again over the years. Leaving scars just above his eyes to give him something else to look at. Something else to see that isn’t his mother’s hatred looking back at him.

Don’t think about his father falling into alcoholism. Tiny 8 year old stiles thinking that his father is grieving, and so he drinks that night. And the night after that and the next. And the drinking isn’t stopping but instead becoming more frequent. Don’t think about stiles holding onto hope that his father might tuck him into bed instead of reaching for the bottle. Stiles picking up whiskeys from the floor with the same colour of his eyes. Don’t think about the moment stiles realizes that his father is trying to drown himself in hopes of reaching Claudia at the bottom. The moment when he has to come to terms with the fact that he might lose both of his parents.

[demigod-shenanigans]

Sometimes I think about how Reyna killed her father (who was, at that point, a mania rather than actually alive) in self-defense when she was a child and how she spends her entire life afterwards with this fact hanging over her head, thinking if it gets out it will doom her. She’s tormented by ghosts for this, saying she’ll be never escape her crime, calling her a traitor and a murderer. Nico tries to tell her that her father was gone by then, and she did what she had to do to protect her sister, but Reyna tells him it doesn’t matter. Her punishment will be the same regardless.

Sometimes I think about how Jason dispelled his mother’s mania and it’s treated as a narrative triumph. He’s chosen his family and she is not a part of it. He has two homes and she doesn’t have a place in either of them. She is in his past and has no power over him. She cannot hurt him anymore.

Sometimes I think about the fact that they never get to fucking talk about this.

[ficauthor]

Tale of two Stans never fails to make me sad. What do you mean these two overly dependent assholes both end up at the worst lowest points of their lives at the same exact moment? What the fuck!? How was it that of everything in their lives to coincide it's them being at their lowest that meet.

What do you mean their childhoods never gave them a chance to be individuals and so all of their weaknesses and blind spots caught up with them in the end. What do you mean that without Ford, Stan was destined to get himself into trouble? What do you mean that without Stan, Ford was destined to get himself in trouble? What the fuck!

What do you fucking mean that they depended on one another because that's all they ever knew.

What do you mean Ford never bothered to learn to read when people wanted to use him cause he had Stan? What do you mean Stan never learned to think ahead because he had Ford?

I'm so haunted by the fact that Ford was able to mostly keep his life stable for a few years but in the end his inability to truly read and connect with people got to him. Why did filbrick make him think he was only good for one thing so he pushed himself too far in a way it was easy to take advantage of? What do you fucking mean his fatal flaw is he's convinced he's never good enough and thus is easy to manipulate?

I'm gutted by the fact that Stan was never doing well by any means but he was surviving against the odds and doing better than terrible. Until his tendency to push things, to prove himself, got him in too deep. Why did filbrick convince him he was good for nothing so he pushed himself to find something he was worth? What do you fucking mean his fatal flaw is he's convinced he's never good enough and thus he's always pushing himself to the edge at great risk to his own safety even?

What do you mean their flaws as people are reflected and can only make full sense with the context of the other. What do you mean!

filbrick Pines how the HELL did you fuck up your sons in a way so poetic and fucked up its beautifully tragic?

[constarlations]

🍊 Big Sis Nemona 🍊

my favorite Unovan/Latina Pokémon trainer ever created

Twitter Link

[jesncin]

The Twin In the Mirror, an origin remix of the Golden Boy arc from Hellblazer.

Precursor to this comic. This one takes a lot of inspiration from When I Arrived At The Castle by E. M. Carroll in terms of visuals and how the characters are staged.

[vampirehizzies]

the cato to annie pipeline is still real to me btw and something i think about because katniss is here thinking about both of them like "wow they are mentally ill" except she's legitimately scared of one and sees the other as docile/meek/an extension of her boyfriend/odd/non-threatening.

but what katniss doesn't seem to remember is annie came from a career district so not only could annie have easily been (and probably was) raised with a similar rhetoric/propaganda/mindset as cato but she also could have terrified the other kids in her arena the same way he did. they became trained killers but they're both exposed to the harsh realities of the arena, watch someone they care about die in a horrifically violent way, and lose themselves/their minds/what they were raised to believe in because of it

[ai-manre]

GRRM really said fuck subtlety I'm here to write soulmates when he wrote Jon and Dany huh

[stardustedknuckles]

It's looking like there's a growing divide between Campaign watchers and Tlovm watchers in terms of like. We're here for the characters. 12-episode seasons aren't. They can't be. I'm already making peace with everything we'll lose in the Mighty Nein show, and I know I will enjoy it for what it is but I also know that almost nothing that made the story so special will translate to the screen, because turning it into a show automatically means (in this day and age) that plot must be the number one priority. They've already come out and told us it's going to be different, the characters we know and love but new stories.

Because that's how this has to work. And I feel bad for campaign one lovers, because while it is certainly the easier of the two to translate to a big, overarching story, even though it's a more "traditional" high fantasy story with easier archetypal characters, the archetypes and the plot aren't what cemented most people's love for the campaign. So much of the love for critical role is stored in the interpersonal dynamics and the payoff that comes from hundreds of hours of tiny interactions that one day become cornerstones of development and even affect or dictate the plot.

There's no room for that. There's no room for Bard's Lament in a story that cannot afford to remove and replace a main character. A lot of tlovm is for people who have been here for all of campaign one. Most of it, however, isn't. It's for a new crowd. While CR may have creative control, you can bet your ass that there were months and years devoted to figuring out how to map a character-focused love of the show into a plot that hits the right beats to be viable in the show market.

And it worked. Tlovm has consistently high viewing numbers, and its popularity has brought and will continue to bring new people into the universe who have never interacted with CR previously. That's not a bad thing - imagine finishing your favorite show and discovering it has another FIVE HUNDRED HOURS of the equivalent of behind the scenes content. That's incredible for these newcomers. But man, it is in many ways a loss for us.

[hopeslastkiss]

rook and solas in the 'bad' ending...much to think about