#Not really obvious now but will be a prominent part of the story later

[queen-haq]

Fic: Grudgingly Yours (Part 3)

Fic: Grudgingly Yours (Part 3)

Summary: You are a general surgeon, working in a hospital that’s slowly sucking the life out of you when one day you’re given the offer of a lifetime.

A.K.A  - An arranged marriage fic :)

Pairing: Billy Russo x You

Rating: R

Masterlist (contains links to my other stories and this one)

Part 3

You removed your glasses and started massaging the knot in your temple that seemed to have lodged inside your head permanently. Exhaling a heavy sigh, you laid your head down on the table. It wouldn’t be easy, you always knew that, but a part of you hadn’t realized how much work would be needed to actually build a clinic in the neighbourhood you grew up in. And this assessment was only the first step! After you completed this, that’s when the real work would begin.

Your phone vibrated and you reached out to grab it. It was the alarm you set to start getting ready for the dinner tonight. Fuck. Alistair was hosting a dinner for you and Billy, but you knew it was an excuse to check up on the two of you. You were already dreading it, imagining how stifling it would be. The last time you had met his family was at the wedding, and they had all looked at you like you were something to be afraid of. To them, you were the other – not rich, not white, not thin, and definitely not someone who was a part of the elite and affluent community they were a part of. And you would never be any of those things, so there was no point in trying to adjust your personality to fit in. Which was why you decided to go with a red jumpsuit to this dinner.

An hour later you were applying finishes touches to your makeup when you heard Billy’s voice in the kitchen. He was talking to Anita, the woman who came to clean the apartment every day. You went to the door, eavesdropping on their conversation.

“Gwen’s not gonna be around anymore, Anita,” he explained.

His voice was gentle, lacking the heavy condescension that was usually directed at you.

“Good, I don’t like her.” The elder lady retorted. “She was very rude!”

He chuckled.

“And it’s not right, you still bringing your girlfriends here when you’re married now. What about your wife?”

“Who gives a fuck?”

Ah, there it was. The biting edge in his tone whenever you were mentioned. You headed out of your bedroom and towards the kitchen.

“She’s a nice lady!” Anita chastised.

“She’s a goddamn bitch.”

“Talking about me again, sweetie?” You sauntered into the kitchen, wearing an amused smile.  

Anita immediately looked embarrassed at being caught but not Billy. Dressed in a perfectly tailored light grey suit, the colour making his pitch black eyes appear even more prominent, he stared back at you with a smug expression. “Speak of the devil and she doth appear.”

“Hush now, Billy,” Anita admonished him.

“First a bitch, now the devil. What’s next?”

“I’ve got some real sweet ones lined up. Just you wait.” He quirked up his eyebrow, eyes regarding your outfit carefully. “It’s black and white dress code.”

You shrugged. “It’s dinner with your family, not the fucking President.”

Billy shook his head. “So hellbent on being a total fucking embarrassment.”

“Billy, stop!” Anita turned to you, her cheeks a deep shade of crimson. “I’m so sorry-”

“It’s fine, Anita. Not your fault. This is just how he likes to sweet-talk me.”

He snickered. “In your fucking dreams.”

“You look beautiful, Y/N,” Anita said, giving you a warm smile. “Red really suits you.”

“Thank you.” While you walked over to the fridge to grab water, you sensed Billy watching you. When you turned around, his gaze shifted from you right away. If he didn’t make his dislike of you so obvious, you would have wondered if he was checking you out. Maybe he was one of those assholes that put down thick women but had a secret fetish for them. Not that you found the notion remotely flattering, it was insulting really.

“The old man doesn’t like being disobeyed,” Billy finally spoke.

You sneered. “You worried about me?”

“I don’t want your stupidity to blow back on me.”

“Don’t worry, I can handle assholes.” Your head dipped to the side, you gave him a beaming smile. “I married you, didn’t I?”

A gasp escaped Anita, she appeared to be scandalized by your words. Seeing the shock on the older woman’s face, you started laughing. As did Billy, much to your surprise. Your eyes scanned over his face, taking in his smile. Damn. He really was fucking gorgeous.

Such a shame that kind of hotness was wasted on a jerk like him.

Suddenly his gaze met yours, the smile on his face fading. He stared at you, stoic and intense, like he was trying to suck the life out of you through the sheer force of his eyes. You turned away, refusing to indulge in this kind of powerplay with him. “Anita, I’m having some people come over on Friday. Think we can stock up on some drinks?”

“Yes, of course,” Anita said, smiling.  “I can prepare some  menus if you like, give you a few options. I’ll hire some waitstaff-”

“God, no. Don’t bother. It’s nothing important.”

“But what about food? What will your guests eat?” Anita asked.

“I’ll order in some stuff.”

“Are you sure?”

The concern on Anita’s face made you chuckle. “Yeah. We’ll be fine.”

Your phone buzzed, and you glanced down at the text message notification.

“In town soon. Wanna meet?”

“See you later, Anita.”

You walked out of the kitchen, already texting back. “How long you around?”

Calvin was a friend you met in college, someone who you hooked up with occasionally. While the two of you always had fun, it was never serious and that’s how you both preferred it.

“Think you own this place?” Billy’s voice captured your attention away from the phone. He sauntered past you, his strut confident, hands tucked into his pockets, before he took a seat on the couch. Arrogance rolled off him in waves, he exuded rich privilege from head to toe as his onyx eyes regarded you with scorn.

“I live here,” you replied, eyebrow cocked.

“For now.”

You smirked. “Aw, you pissed I didn’t ask for your permission?”

“I don’t want your golddigging friends infesting this place.”

His cockiness made you laugh, and you felt that oh-so-familiar need to taunt him further. You sashayed forward, your sexiest walk on full display because you knew how much it would irritate him. Already you saw his jaw clench, noted how his eyes burned with contempt as you took a seat on the arm of the couch he was on. Leaning over him, you gave him your sexiest smirk. “You sure that’s all it is?” You lowered your head, so close you felt his breath hum against your skin. “Maybe what you’re really worried about is flexing for my friends. Maybe you know they’re not gonna be impressed by you.”

Billy’s pitch-black eyes remained glued to yours, inhaling you in. “A lion doesn’t concern himself with the opinion of sheep.”

You reached out to grip his jaw, the action taking him by surprise if the arced eyebrow was any indication. God, he had a beautiful jawline, his facial hair perfectly trimmed, his skin smooth. “Is that what you think you are, Billy? A lion?” You tightened your grip. “Because all I see is a fucking snake when I look at you.”

It happened quickly, so quickly that you barely had time to register what he was doing when he clutched the back of your head. He fisted your hair so tightly that it almost hurt, pulling you close against him. You were crushed against his chest, whatever advantage you had now gone.

“Don’t. Ever. Touch me again.”

His voice was quiet, which made his words even more dangerous. He didn’t need to scream or yell to get his point across. Seeing his reaction, you instantly regretted your actions. Maybe he was someone who was triggered by physical contact, it was common enough in people and you had dealt with it a few times when caring for patients. You released your grip on him, but he didn’t follow suit, still holding you securely in place.

In your experience, people who didn’t like being touched were also careful to respect others’ boundaries. That didn’t seem to be the case with Billy, recalling the night of your wedding when he’d threatened you. “You put your hands on my throat and choked me,” you reminded him.

“But you liked that, golddigger. You were begging for it.”

God, his fucking cockiness was infuriating! You shoved him hard, forcing him to loosen his hold immediately and you jumped back to distance yourself. There you were trying to be nice, and he just completely stomped all over your compassionate gesture. “Asshole!”

He grinned, crossing his legs and looking so smug and pleased with himself you wanted to throw something at him.

Everything – everything – about him annoyed the fuck out of you. “Fuck off and die, Billy!”

He laughed, eyes shining with wicked delight.

“And stay out of my way on Friday! I don’t want my guests dealing with you!” you huffed before stomping out of the room.

The nerve of him! You were so pissed you could barely even think straight, but you needed to conserve your energy for tonight. Taking a deep breath, you returned to your room to finish getting ready.

***

The atmosphere was strained, the tension in the room palpable. Alistair sat at the head of the table, commanding everyone’s attention, while the rest of the family appeared downright miserable. One by one he’d gone around the table, picking apart each person under the guise of doling out helpful advice with everyone dreading the spotlight when it fell upon them. Alistair was very practiced with his criticism; he didn’t resort to yelling or screaming. Instead his words were laced with poison and deliberately targeted one’s most vulnerable spots. A part of you felt sorry for them, which was funny considering how rich they were and that you grew up in the ghetto. But at least you were brought up in a loving home, unlike these people.

You surveyed the room, taking in Billy’s family. Along with Alistair, his parents were present and some of Billy’s cousins. As an outsider, you had a chance to observe the family dynamic and it didn’t surprise you that the camaraderie they put on display was just a show. As you eavesdropped on their conversation, you could hear them talking shit and selling each other out. Underneath the polite exterior, they were all snakes – just like Alistair. The only exception, surprisingly, was Billy.

He kept to himself for most of the night, simply examining the family from the sidelines. Just like you. Occasionally your gaze would land on him and you found him staring back at you intently each time, but you weren’t in a mood to fuck with him. You were still annoyed from earlier, and it didn’t help that the family was obviously gossiping about you.

Both Billy and you had chosen to ignore the dress code, which probably seemed like it was intentionally planned but definitely wasn’t. His light grey suit stood out in the sea of black and white, just like your red jumpsuit, but his outfit didn’t elicit as many looks as yours did. But, whatever. You had purposely chosen this outfit. If you were going to be the subject of gossip anyway, you might as well give them something to talk about.

It was Alistair’s voice that brought you out of your reverie. Your stomach clenched with nervous anxiety as Alistair’s attention slowly approached your side of the table. Half of the family looked obliterated, the other half drunk. Billy was seated next to you, and a part of you wondered what was going through his head. Was he used to this? Did he even realize how fucked up his whole family was?

“It’s unfortunate you didn’t choose to meet Howard for lunch yesterday, Billy.”

You cast a quick glance at Billy. Unlike the rest of his family, he didn’t seem bothered or nervous by Alistair’s cutting tone.

“Is it?” Billy replied, taking a sip of his wine.

“He’s a very busy man and he agreed to meet you as a favour to me.”

“Maybe you should check before you make plans for me,” Billy responded.

Oh, Alistair didn’t like that.

“Do you know how humiliating it was for me to ask someone like Howard for his assistance? He’s a gnat, he’s nothing. Yet I had to reach out to him so he could guide you-”

“And how many times have I said I’m not interested in joining politics, Grandfather? I have no fucking interest in it, I don’t give a shit about it.”

Alistair slammed his hand down on the table. A silent hush fell over the room. “You will do as I say! I will not let you be another loser in this family. I will not accept that! You’re destined to be more than just some foot soldier. This family’s full of idiots, everyone has been a goddamn disappointment! But not you, you’re better than that. You’re my legacy and I will not let your stupidity and stubbornness get in the way of making something of yourself. You will not waste-”

“Are you fucking serious?” You asked, interrupting the old man’s tirade. “A foot soldier? He’s a marine! He’s gone out on three tours and risked his life over and over again to keep this country safe. He’s probably saved countless lives and done more for people than anyone around this table. What have you done? What have you accomplished other than being borne into a rich family?” Fired up, your blood was boiling with rage. “And you’re criticizing him for wasting his life? Why? Because he doesn’t want to be a slimy politician? Your fucking puppet?”

“How dare you speak to me like that?” Alistair roared.

“How dare you? You think I’m just gonna sit here and listen while you yell at my husband?” You scanned the people around the table, noticing their stunned gazes, the fear and shock in their eyes as they glared at you. “Maybe everyone here is scared shitless of you because you hold the purse strings but that doesn’t give you the right to dictate others’ lives. Billy’s an adult. He’s made his own choices, good choices. Just because you don’t agree with them doesn’t make them bad decisions.” You glanced down, shaking your head with irritation. It was then you noticed Billy’s hand covering your right thigh under the table, slowly caressing your skin as if he was trying to soothe your nerves. During your outburst you hadn’t noticed when his hand slid over but now it was all you could feel, the heat of his touch searing through the fabric of your clothes.

Alistair’s face was flushed red with anger. “The only reason you’re a part of this family, why you’re at this table, is because I allowed you to be here.”

What the hell were you doing? You had better things to do than take part in Russo family problems. This was not your circus, not your monkeys. If they wanted to eat each other alive, so be it. “And that’s my cue to leave. I’ve had enough of you guys for today.”

Easing Billy’s hand from your thigh, you stood up. Your glass was half-full and you didn’t see the point in wasting the excellent wine. You chugged it in one gulp, clinked your glass in an imaginary cheer to the room before placing it back on the table, and then walked out.

As soon as you exited the space, you felt your stomach uncoil. All that nervous anxiety left your body in one big whoosh, you took a deep breath. Holy shit. You were never more grateful for your own family as you were at that moment.

***

Half an hour later you entered your high-rise building, greeting the doorman as you made your way to the elevator. When the doors opened you slid in and scanned the key card that gave you access to the penthouse. The elevator doors were closing when all of a sudden someone waved their hand halfway in, forcing the doors to open again. You looked up to see Billy walking in, dark eyes holding you hostage. You averted his gaze, pressing the close button again.

As soon as the elevator started moving, he marched towards you. You watched him confusedly as he closed the distance, forcing you to retreat until you were backed into a corner, his body encroaching every inch of your personal space.

You swallowed audibly, returning his hostile stare.

“I don’t need you to fight my battles for me.” His voice was raspy, somehow soft and yet menacing. “I can stand up for myself.”

You sneered. “You think I did it for you?” You jut your chin out defiantly. “I don’t like bullies and your grandfather is a fucking bully. It had nothing to do with you. I would’ve stood up for anyone, it just happened to be you.”

The molten darkness of his gaze trailed down to your lips, as if following every micro change in your expression. Like he was trying to consume you, understand you. “Except you didn’t stand up for the rest of my family. Only me.”

He had a point, but you weren’t going to admit that. “Step back, Billy.”

Billy didn’t withdraw, he continued to hold firm. Your eyes lingered from his face, taking in his firm jaw, the graceful length of his neck, noting how the top button of his collared shirt was undone. A soft breath escaped your lips when his hands slid up the sides of your legs, your waist, trailing up languidly.

You pressed your hand against his chest, intending to push him off.

When his hand covered your own in a surprising gesture, his skin felt hot against your touch. You didn’t understand what he was doing, why he wouldn’t move. Maybe it was a ploy to get you to break but there was something else in his eyes you hadn’t seen before. A kind of vulnerability that left you breathless. Not something you wanted to deal with. “I said move back.”

“This isn’t gonna happen, sweetheart,” he murmured.

Not golddigger. Sweetheart. It was meant to be sarcastic, you were sure of it, but instead the word was pure seduction on his lips, intoxicating. And oddly tender.

“You’re not going to claw your way inside my head. I won’t let you.” It was a warning, a threat, temptation wrapped in danger.

“That’s the last thing I want,” you said, surprised at how resolute you sounded and not at all the quivering mess you felt inside.

He didn’t say anything in response. There was no sarcasm, no scorn, no signs of anger or derision even. Just stark seriousness.

“Stay the fuck away from me.”

He turned around and walked out, leaving you perplexed. You hadn’t realized the elevator reached your floor, all of your senses overwhelmed by Billy’s close proximity. The subtle notes of his cologne still lingered in the air and you took a few seconds to calm your nerves. Not until you heard the door slam to your penthouse did you exit the elevator and head inside.

A/N - Hope you guys are enjoying the fic! Would love to hear your thoughts if you have the time. Comments are loved and cherished :)

[weightedblankettt]

An Analysis on the Literature Girl Insane MV!

Hey! You might not know me that much, as I’m not active in the DRDTheory community, as I’ve dubbed it, but my name is Blanket! Technically, this is a work of collaboration between the majority of DRDT Twitter, but it’s mainly just an analysis of stuff I couldn’t do by myself.

Okay, and now, onto the video!

So we start off with the spoiler warning. Pretty standard stuff, of course.

Many of my theories beginning here will be based on the colors and what I, personally, associate them with. Of course, the actual MV’s contents will be looked at further down the line. 

As a bonus, take note of what pops up right after that. It’s a question: Do you want to forgive... someone? We’ll answer this question later on in the theories section.

These are mainly just lyrics, but the “final verdict” part catches my eye, as I believe it isn’t in the lyrics further down the line. Perhaps it’s about the current trial? As many people believe, David did not kill Arei. His reasons for lying about doing so are unknown, but we can assume that the singer is calling the listeners idiots, because of their incorrect final verdict. Whatever David wants to do, it’s certainly not leading them to the right one.

Next, these lyrics. While I believe it’s fairly obvious that the pink is meant to represent the typical Danganronpa-esque color of their blood, the color that the word “game” is in is probably relates to David. After all, his hair clips and star eyes, both prominent features of his “facade”, are in the same color.

Here is where the most prominent part of the MV is, to me. The text that flashes across the screen during transition points. The first one, in white text, is an excerpt from Osamu Dazai’s “The Flowers of Buffoonery.” The book, while I’ll spare you the greater details, greatly describes themes of suicide. The story’s main protagonist, Yozo Oba, can be described as so: “-But the narrator, a self-conscious writer, makes frequent first-person asides, breaking the fourth wall as he comments on the quality or believability of the novel he is writing.” 

Something especially telling is this line, from an analysis of Yozo’s character. “Yozo is a person characterized by shame. Although I pretend to be someone who is confident and unabashedly themselves, that is not really true. I have always been ashamed of who I really am. I created a whole persona to interact with others because I believed my true self would never be enough.”

David’s character is someone very similar to that. Someone who has created a false persona to interact with others. Yozo is someone who feels resentful of other people, simply because he is forced to make them happy. “Yozo Oba is the tortured author and unreliable narrator of the three notebooks that comprise the bulk of No Longer Human. [That is the sequel to The Flowers of Buffoonery.] His appearance is depicted in three photographs examined by an unnamed narrator in the Prologue. These three photographs correspond to his appearance in each of the three notebooks. As a child, Yozo is precocious by design—an impish child who uses his antics to hide his fear, shame, and inability to relate to humanity. These fundamental flaws carry over into young adulthood; in the second notebook, he is a handsome young man whose smiling photograph lacks humanity, betraying the depth of terror and isolation that his comical persona seeks to hide. In the third photograph and notebook, he is only 27, but his gray hair and forgettable appearance prevent him from being labeled an ordinary human being.”

The quotes in yellow are from Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express.” The full quote reads as follows. "If you confront anyone who has lied with the truth, they usually admit it – often out of sheer surprise. It is only necessary to guess right to produce your effect." I think the relevancy of this line in terms of David can be explained with his actions so far. Fun fact: Similarly to Danganronpa, “Murder on the Orient Express” is a murder mystery. 

This is just a rickroll. DRDTDev thinks that they are FUNNY!? (They are.)

The “an archaic personal pronoun rarely used in real life, but popularized in fiction by the book” is most likely referring to thou/thy/etc. I’m not sure what this correlates to, but it’s probably important. I couldn’t find the green text, but from what I can tell, the green text probably relates to David’s nihilistic point of view towards humanity. Update: Bleuflower on Tumblr has located the source to be I Am A Cat by Natsume Soseki, so go check her out for that! If I had to say anything about that, it’d probably be relating to MonoTV, however, there’s also a continuation of David’s nihilism towards humanity that was also found in the Osamu Dazai references. The book itself is described as a “mordantly comic evocation of Sōseki's deep pessimism about his own humanity and indeed about humankind in general.”

The white text here is an excerpt from Osamu Dazai’s “No Longer Human,” which follows the same protagonist as “The Flowers of Buffoonery.” I’m sure you can all gather what that means in relation to David, but the main point is that he seems detached from his view of “normalcy.” @shidoutism on Twitter had this to say, as they’ve read the book itself: “OKOK so basically this first excerpt is from 'no longer human' by osamu dazai (its his last finished work because dazai sadly took his own life after publication of the book) now from the limited knowledge i have of david the meaning and message of the book might help in whatever analysis ur doing?? no longer human is about a man who never felt like he understood humans. like the title suggests, he never felt like a person. its revealed the protag was pretty sheltered and rich in childhood but experienced trauma from the familys housekeepers, but he never reported it. thats basically the start of it all as the protag grows up, he finds fear in communicating with humans. so he ends up either isolating himself and/or destroying all of his relationships with people. he's scared of people seeing the real him, so ever since he was a child he started putting up a happy, cheerful front. but it just creeped some ppl out bc it didn't feel genuine, it was more like a clown wanting to so badly entertain others. the protag starts resorting to bad coping mechanisms such as dr/gs and alc/hol and has many relationships with women to drown his sorrows and feel closer to being 'a human'. aaand the end of the book is kinda unsettling as the protag is sent to a rehab center and then when released, isolated himself somewhere far away without people, stating "everything passes. thats the one thing i learned in this living hell [somewhere along those lines]" and the book ends numbly like it feels like nothing”

I don’t know about you, but this sounds rather similar to our “protagonist.”

This quote is from “The Setting Sun”, by, you guessed it, Osamu Dazai. It tells a similar story, albeit with a different protagonist, but I feel like this ties in more with his facade, and how his inspirational speaking comes off to other people. Considering he is in his facade at this time of the MV, it’s safe to say that that’s what this is referring to.

And now, this all falls into place. These are the names of the Osamu Dazai books referenced in the text beforehand. The (I’m), next to No Longer Human, however, could signify how David views himself. Someone so sunken into depravity that they don’t register themselves as human anymore.

The faded text here is the first sentence of Yasunari Kawabata’s “Snow Country”. I don’t know what this refers to in terms of David, but this also seems important.

David still views himself as manipulative. Even if he does love people, even if he does have a semblance of care for those in his life, he views himself as an evil, irredeemable sack of shit, incapable of any emotion other than selfishness and cruelty.

This part is especially intriguing to me. David still wants to live, as anyone else does, but he can’t bring himself to find a reason to leave. His career is dead. He’s worthless, and nobody needs him around. Where would he go? There’s no room for him anywhere, even if he escaped, he’d just be shunned for good now that his entire life has been thrown away. 

The excerpt from “And Then There Were None” by Agatha Christie, describes someone losing motivation to leave the island. The island is a metaphor for the building, that the students are trapped inside, and David has lost the will to leave in the first place. He doesn’t want to leave, because there’s nowhere else for him to even go. He doesn’t have a home. He doesn’t have a fanbase. There’s nothing left.

The text here reads: “If you’re Hythlodaeus, then I must be Morus.” This refers to the work “Utopia”, written by Thomas More. The book follows Raphael Hythlodaeus, a man who claims to be from Utopia, a perfect place for everyone. His surname quite literally means “Bringer of Nonsense,” or something along those lines. While this may be a stretch, I believe that “Hythlodaeus” is referring to Pre-Reveal David, and “Morus” could possibly be either Post-Reveal David or someone affected by his speeches, for example Xander.

Also, I find it interesting how the girl in this frame, most likely David’s “sister,” Diana, and David himself are both tilting their heads at similar angles. It’s possible that their relation is hinted at through this, but I’m not sure.

The excerpt right here is from Kajii Motojiro’s entry in the Kyoto Journal, entitled “Lemon”. While some of the text has been altered, the main story is about a man who finds himself suffering, and walks through his neighbourhood only to find a greengrocer selling lemons. He goes home, and finds himself happier than before. I’m not sure what this means when it comes to David, however if you’d like, you can analyze for yourself and let me know.

https://www.kyotojournal.org/fiction-poetry/lemon/

This part doesn’t have any external references, but I believe that the lyrics here reinforce David’s worldview, that no matter what you do and how hard you try, “nobody ever changes.”

The star imagery here is a direct reference to David. Stars are representative of his happy facade, and when he loses the stars, he quits the bullshit. 

…And this frame. Alright, let’s start from the top. The electrocution definition is a callback to Xander, who’s referenced quite a few times in the video. The yellow text, which is from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “The Little Prince”, is possibly a reference to David’s view on other people or himself- That nobody is special unless you were born special. However, the end of the text describes that if the boy were to tame the fox, the speaker, that they would need each other. I’m not sure if this is a description of manipulation, or a codependent relationship, but the David parallels are there. That, and the title of a “little prince” probably refers to David and how he’s idolized by many. The green text is, again, from “The Flowers of Buffoonery.” The full text is as follows. “A man crushed by reality puts on a show of endurance. If that's beyond your comprehension, dear reader, then you and I will never understand each other. Life's a farce, so we might as well make it a good one. But real life is a realm that I may never reach. The best that I can hope for is to loiter in the memory of these four days, so steeped with empathy. Four days that count more than

five or ten years of my life. Four days that count more than a lifetime.”

In reference to David, this is more representative of his true feelings. Not the asshole persona or the facade, but the genuine feelings he has. He already feels far too gone by his own standards, and constantly puts on a “show” for other people in the form of his speeches. 

The red text is possibly a person dealing with depression speaking on one of their symptoms. There’s no way I could find a source for such a short quote. A common symptom of depression is losing interest in things you previously found enjoyable.

The white text on the side describes someone who finds pleasure in solitude as opposed to being bossed around by other people. It’s a reference to David’s backstory, as someone who was pressured into putting on a performance for others, finding comfort in being alone rather than having to play pretend whenever around other people.

The white text at the bottom is a continuation of the white text at the top.

The only theory I can think of for this is that it’s a foreshadowing to either gaps in their memory or the amount of survivors left in the killing game being four. Not sure.

Update: I don’t know how I missed this, but the “11” next to the suspicious gaps refers to this. It’s possible that the suspicious gaps are gaps in their memory now, being as he doesn’t remember having an older sister, but her existence is most likely confirmed, as we saw her. 

This part here is referring to “Catch 22,” when the main character realizes that without a soul, humans are just… matter, if you will. Empty husks.

For this part, I had to call upon my not-so-trustworthy old friend, Google Translate! The translation of this from Latin is “I think, therefore I am (not.)” That’s what makes the most sense to me. We’ll refer back to this part later, for I have a different intention for it in my mind than David himself.

The dark blue text is another excerpt from “The Little Prince.” The prince in question is talking to a castaway, and the main takeaway of his words is that only your heart can tell you what you really need. If you were to simply look with your eyes, then what you truly need would be drowned out by the blinding light of superficial desires. I’m pretty sure that’s what that means. David is looking through his eyes, seeing a cruel world where nobody changes unless they were born to.

Now, let’s get into the next big part of the MV: The crossword puzzle. You might be wondering how this relates to David, but its moreso his own commentary on his classmates. Let’s go back to the latin. Pay attention to this reference of the solved crossword by raspbeyes on Tumblr. It will be very important for you to follow along.

Notice how there’s roman numerals in some of David’s lyrics? For example, this that we established earlier meant “I think therefore I am (not.)” This is referring to Rose. Her photographic memory can be linked to the description of “thinking.” The context of this may become clearer in future parts of the story. 

III. That’s Charles. “If you doubt brittle things are broken.” Is, in my mind, referring to his memories. He has a recurring element of not remembering things, but he doesn’t seem to be aware of this until Chapter 2. For example, his secret- “Your older brother died, but you don’t remember him at all.”

IV. Arei. Her breakdown sequence should be all you need to associate this with her.

V. This is Ace. He’s going insane, obviously, because of the paranoia and failed murder attempt against him. That, and he’s become more disheveled as the game progressed.

XIV. Veronika, correct? Substance to the arts relates to her talent as a Horror Fanatic. Naturally, she’d be related to things like that.

XV. Whit’s refusal to accept his mother’s death, staying ignorant to the tragedies around him, is one of the “happiest” members of the cast.

XI. Mai Akasaki is not mentioned in the current story, and all of her quotes hidden amongst the cast members describe her in past tense. She was someone everyone viewed as reliable, trustworthy, and perhaps, if you exaggerated it, as God.

These two walls of text are both from the same source: Hamlet’s Solliloquy of “To Be, or Not to Be?”

This is what the thing actually means, in case you aren’t aware, which even I wasn’t until just now. It represents David’s suicidal ideology, from what we can assume with the way he’s trying to get everyone to vote wrong in the trial for Arei, quite well. Whether he wants to live, or die, is most likely a constant struggle for David to answer.

Which is why he leaves it up to… whoever can answer.

This is an absolute reference to the trial. The class trial rules are overlaid over the death portrait texture, which is “conveniently” covering David’s face. The seventeen here is also telling, considering what the description has to say about it!

This is what I believe is David’s end goal. To get everyone executed as a result of his own hopelessness. By pretending to be the killer and antagonizing the class, he believes he can easily sway the votes by “manipulating the public” as he always believes he’s done. By getting everyone to vote for him, he can end the killing game and his own “pathetic life” in one fell swoop.

After all, it’s not like he believes they have a chance of winning and escaping in the first place.

And here, is where we left off in Episode 11. David completely drops his facade in order to effectively kill himself, along with everyone else. After realizing the hopelessness of his situation, he makes a drastic turn to accept it readily. Someone who self-sabotages continues to do so because they develop a warped perspective of having control.

And again referring to the description, the 12 near the “Tallying Votes” caption refers to this. It’s David’s way of justifying his selfishness, with a diluted form of justice serving as an “ultimately fair verdict to the trial.” 

However, David has always wanted to be loved. It’s why he even bothers with his facade, because he’s been putting it up for so long that disregarding his persona would effectively ruin everything he’s worked so hard to maintain in the first place. The repeated imagery of applause could also be a callback to his status as a celebrity, especially with how he reacted to Xander and Arei’s reliance on him.

While this does have a small fade of text pointing out that the “degraded copy” is the cover, which is not true because the MV is amazing, but. I believe this–

Oh. That’s literally it. Well, that makes one mystery solved!

Hey, look, we’re already halfway through! nice! Eden’s optimistic personality can be referenced here. She wants to live with everyone, together, and make sure that nobody gets hurt. 

This is another reference to David’s rambling on about how attempting to change is utterly futile, and that nobody changes. 

The yellow text is the definition of a television show, I believe. The blue text is an excerpt from “And Then There Were None,” by Agatha Christie. The full quote is this: “Breakfast was a curious meal. Everyone was very polite…. Six people, all outwardly self-possessed and normal. And within? Thoughts that ran round in a circle like squirrels in a cage…. ‘What next? What next? Who? Which?’...” …Do you get it? It’s a parallel to the killing game. Or, rather, how David views it. Everyone is terrified and scared for their lives, but they still greet eachother with mock kindness.

The blue text on the side is an excerpt from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.”, and it goes like this: “I am in blood / Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er.” A critical analysis of the original work reads as follows: Shakespeare is saying here that Macbeth has involved himself in so many murders that it is as easy for him to carry on than to turn back. Macbeth compares his course of action with wading across a river of blood, creating a vivid image of his bloody reign. The word 'tedious' reveals the hardening of Macbeth's heart.

And now, the moment I’m sure most of you have been waiting for. Xander. Something I took notice of was that the cracks line up directly with his left eye, while his right eye is the one that’s actually missing in the game. Nonetheless, Xander clearly did mean something to David. Whether it be through his idolization of David, or if he inspired David in some way, his death had an impact on him. Manipulative persona or not. 

XVI translates to Hu from the crossword puzzle. He’s taunting her, similarly to how he did in the trial, although the ??? makes me wonder if it actually IS David…

XII, that’s Eden. I assume it’s because of her optimistic persona that she is standing in someone’s way, although we’re not sure who. 

For the next part, let’s say we take this at face value. It could definitely be referencing David allegedly pushing Arei to commit suicide, although this could also be something he internalizes, with the themes of suicide and wishing to be dead explored previously.

These are all repeats of the previous works included in the MV, like The Little Prince, Ozamu Dazai’s series, Agatha Christie’s works, etc etc.

Now, this is code, I’m assuming, but I tried translating it and couldn’t find anything. It’s a common encryption language. In case you want to translate it, it’s: 3aqxw97pktc8uki458fbdpfoacllex2f07bf8mg24b4mpfx2adc6v3f5yhxjd8i7sf11312zaj5lazet47jod5jczec5mvb6bz2o59r143sf2pe916sczcn7emvbl55ehe9iqb2708tt83482c8tw3c77gn47ojca634gbcfz0016s647wwlakcn46brcle0eam9

NOTE: @glorywelpchild on Twitter says… “For this, it may have been encrypted multiple times by different engines? I'm not a programmer so I'm not really familiar lmao. Another thing, it could be a type of programming the dev knows/commonly uses.”

The VI here is Arturo, but I don’t know what this means. Perhaps the description can give us some insight?

Hmm… Well, I don’t mind. Whatever you say.

Nico’s number is VIII, and this is referring to the defense they put up when asked about their intentions against Ace’s life. They claim they never thought about it, and “even if they try to think, they don’t know.”

This is Levi’s, as per the IX. 

I actually managed to find the original image in the background. It’s a study on Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9’s orbit around Jupiter for several years before crashing into the planet. While the name, Shoemaker Levy, may be a play on Levi’s name, I believe this is also referencing that he may die soon. Maybe this is a stretch, but the symbolism of a comet named “Shoemaker Levy” crashing into Jupiter being right under a symbol that represents Levi, our prime suspect in a game where being caught results in death, is too far to be a coincidence. Part of my theory for Chapter 2 is that Levi is the blackened, after all, but that is in a previous post. Nonetheless, we can move on.

This is “Enterance of the Gladiators.” While it is now associated with silly things like clowns, it was originally a military march song. Hmm, where have I heard this description before?

Ah, that’s right! In the description!

These two are relatively straightforward. The David we meet in the prologue is his facade, and it serves as an introduction. However, we are re-introduced to him with a whole personality change, and that comes delayed from all the others.

This is a direct reference to MonoTV and the throne in the trial room.

The truth bullets. Typical Danganronpa symbolism, and it’s also a neat little reference to Xander’s custom weapon.

References to some of the students. The dresser is Levi, the bowl of fruit is Rose, the gun is Xander, the teapot is Hu, and the candle is maybe J?

The clock is Eden, the portrait, maybe a reference to the game? The stupid kid’s toy might be Whit.

Teruko and Mai. Teruko’s misfortune and Mai’s idealization are both key parts of their characters.

The gavel, another reference. The kitchen knife, Min. The skull, Veronika. The mirror… Possibly Xander because we’ve seen him with broken glass earlier in the MV, but it might be David and his personas making another reference.

The mastermind, sitting atop their comfortable chair.

The noose is Arei, the gas mask is Charles, the mouse is Nico, the theater mask… Perhaps the mastermind again, or Veronika again. The safe is David’s locked away and suppressed emotions. These are all mainly theories based on observation, don’t take it as the wholehearted truth.

David being mentioned again with the hair clips. The lemon has been brought up beforehand, it’s a callback to the journal entry. The dummies represent David’s detachment from his humanity, and the television is a callback to the fact that they’re on a television show.

David views himself as a snake, a liar, a murderer. Snakes are common imagery to use when referring to the Devil as well. The blood is a callback to the killing game itself.

Either a reference to Min, or the fact that all the books are empty could be visual dramatization of David’s feelings. There’s supposed to be something in them, but the books are empty. The “various kinds” could also be how many personas he puts on, if that’s a prominent part of his backstory.

The killing game is being broadcasted, so that counts as terrorist iconography, if nothing else. Dandelions, while beautiful in their own way, don’t belong in a garden. The megaphone is David’s custom weapon, and it’s a way for him to broadcast his speeches to those around the world.

The letters are from the joke comic that the dev released. You know the one, where Xander writes a letter for David and he accidentally throws it away thinking that it’s garbage. The popular toy refers to the commercializing of the Tragedy, as Veronika explained on the first day of Chapter 2. How horror movies will put black-and-white designs in their films to up the fear factor because of the subliminal/primal fear of the design back in the days of the Tragedy. The flowers… No idea.

This is cleverly disguised, but it’s a reference to the debate between continuing to live and killing yourself. To be or not to be, to stop or to keep going, but they’re both lit up. How are you to do both at the same time? You have to make a choice.

Main Roles are David and Xander. It makes sense, considering they both have full-body moments and we know who they are. The crossed out name is Mai Akasaki, but the cut off name is a bit harder to decipher. Thanks to some inspiration and help, I’ve come to my final conclusion regarding this.

They are related to Arei, 100%. The letters match perfectly.

Even in comparison to Arei, the “N” in her name starts only a bit earlier, but that’s because the first word is probably only two or three letters, in comparison to the four letters in Arei.

Originally, I couldn’t translate any of these. All I could make out was that the first hand was Xander and the second hand was Min or Mai. However. @MAHIRUMILGRAM on twitter managed to translate them! They are as follows:

After this point, the truth bullet breaks through David’s words, similarly to how Teruko is fighting against David, despite the truth bullet being in agreement towards David’s idea.

There’s also this, which could be David trying to deflect us from the truth, or that the lyrics genuinely don’t relate to him. I’m leaning towards the former.

The white text at the top here is from a story, entitled “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” It is about a beautiful city where everyone is happy. However, their city is not as beautiful as it seems. They tell the story of how the townspeople have locked a child in a basement, and left it to suffer. Their happiness, as they’ve been told, requires a sacrifice. “Inside the room, which is behind a locked door, there are a couple of dirty mops, a bucket, and a young child. The child is ten years old, but looks younger. The child is scared and completely miserable. It is never allowed to leave the room. Occasionally, someone opens the door and kicks the child to make it stand up. The person fills the food bowl halfway with corn meal and grease, fills the water jug, and leaves. The child can remember what the outside world looks like and begs and pleads to be let out. The child is naked and covered in sores, and it wails at night in its misery. The people of Omelas all know about the child in the basement. They all understand that everything good about Omelas, from their abundance of food to the good weather, depends upon the suffering of the child. They all understand this because when children are between the ages of eight and twelve, they are brought to see the child, and this tradeoff is explained to them. During this experience, the children of Omelas are disgusted. They want to help, but they are told they can’t. If anyone helps the child by clothing, feeding, or otherwise caring for it, then the perfect happiness of Omelas and its abundance would die. Therefore, no one may even speak kindly to the child.” I wanted to include this because it describes David so well. Someone who has been cast away because they’re deemed useless to society, someone who’s happiness would destroy the happiness of anyone else. I find the story truly fascinating, as it might describe David’s suppressed emotions and the depressive tendencies he indulges himself in.

“Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free.”

“How you have felt, O men of Athens, at hearing the speeches of my accusers, I cannot tell; but I know that their persuasive words almost made me forget who I was—such was the effect of them; and yet they have hardly spoken a word of truth [alēthēs]. But many as their falsehoods were, there was one of them which quite amazed me—I mean when they told you to be upon your guard, and not to let yourselves be deceived by the force of my eloquence. They ought to have been ashamed of saying this, because they were sure to be detected as soon as I opened my lips and displayed my deficiency; they certainly did appear to be most shameless in saying this, unless by the force of eloquence they mean the force of truth [alēthēs]; for then I do indeed admit that I am eloquent. But in how different a way from theirs! Well, as I was saying, they have hardly uttered a word, or not more than a word, of truth [alēthēs]; but you shall hear from me the whole truth [alēthēs]: not, however, delivered after their manner, in a set oration duly ornamented with words and phrases.”

Do you remember, in the prologue, where Xander describes the “rumors” against David’s positive front? This is a direct parallel. Here, Socrates denounces the words of his attackers, similarly to how nobody truly believes the rumors except for the critics themselves. Even Xander was fooled by his charisma.

“Was't Hamlet wrong'd Laertes? Never Hamlet: If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away, And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes, 240 Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it. Who does it, then? His madness: if't be so, Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong'd; His madness is poor Hamlet's enemy.”

Hamlet blames his own insanity for the death of Laertes’ father. Just like David tries to get everyone killed, and blames himself for murdering Arei, because of his own insanity.

This is a line from the poem “Be Not Defeated by The Rain,” by Kenji Miyazawa. It describes a man wishing to become someone strong, someone who cannot be bested. I believe this is exactly what David wants, too. To be as strong and as hopeful as he is forced to pretend to be, instead of a hopeless mess who would rather die than be seen as worthless.

David reaches the height of his insanity, before finally quieting down after being basked in green light. I don’t know if this was intentional, but I believe that it represents how he’s given up on even death after the students manage to vote correctly, hence the green coloring.

And now, number 19.

I severely doubt that David will actually die in Chapter 3. That is not “foreshadowing,” that is just giving out the answer, and DRDTDev is much more careful than that. I believe this is a final representation of David’s suicidal ideologies. He says he will forget, he says guilt will not weigh him down, but he’s lying to himself. That’s why the stars are still behind him, because he’s still lying. He says he is satisfied, he says he’s okay with death, but when has David ever been truthful with us?

And he leaves an empty throne behind. Not because he is dead, but because he has relinquished his career and his reputation for nothing.

Even though he is missing, nothing else has changed. That is how he views his life.

And that concludes the main analysis of David’s MV! It’s such a beautiful thing, really, I don’t know how to phrase any of it properly. Thank you to everyone who’s read this far, and everyone who helped me out. The decoding and puzzles? Ah, I’ll let you all do that… But, maybe I can help a little! Blanket, out~! See you all next time!

[possum-quesadilla]

New Lonely Remnants chapter, “But you see, it’s not me, it’s not my family”, is here! Please read the warnings before proceeding!

Here are the extras!

- The lyrics for this chapter’s title are from “Zombie” by The Cranberries! Heheh, zombie. It is meant to be from the Shoggoth’s perspective as it sees all of these memories and is disoriented by them.

- “There were other various items as well; a few faded colorful thread friendship bracelets, a raggedy old plush cat, a few colorful rocks, and many more buried under the photos.” - The friendship bracelets were mostly from his twin sister, but one of them was one Lydia made for him when they first met. The plush cat is his favorite childhood stuffed animal (his name is Binx!), and the rocks are from all of the various national parks he’s visited.

- “That stack seemed to be a bunch of family get-togethers. Dozens of kids and adults having cookouts, dressed in similar formal outfits. Photos inside and just outside churches, many people smiling brightly at the camera. Lydia found herself softly frowning as she and Barbara both leaned in close on either side of Adam to get a good look. “… is that… his family?” ” - Lawrence was part of a large extended family that met up often, and went to church together every Sunday.

- “The one on top seemed to be someone taking a picture with.. Lydia thought maybe an old Sony Cyber-shot in a mirror, their face primarily obscured by the camera. They seemed to be wearing dark baggy clothes, posing awkwardly with a peace sign from their free hand.” - Lawrence got that camera for his 13th birthday, most of the photos in the box from that point on were taken by him! It stopped working, but Emily insisted on keeping it for the memories. It’s in her office at Lydia’s house.

- “Bella. Her name is Bella.” - Readers of both my fics, yes his twin is this universe’s version of Bela! She is very fundamentally different in this fic. She and Lawrence were inseparable before he left. They never fought or anything, he just left without a word. She never really found out what happened to him.

- “It was a very young Lawrence, posing in front of a roadside sign that read “Now leaving Louisiana”. It was obvious he was the one holding the camera. His hair was cut horribly choppy and short, with random longer patches and a horrible purple dye job. His eyes were glassy, and he had deep bags and dark circles prominently under them. He had one small tattoo on his arm as opposed to the many he later had, his nails were painted black as per usual as he held up his free hand in the universal ‘rock on’ sign, and he was sticking his tongue out, revealing a tongue piercing.” - He is 16 here, the day of him running away! He cut and dyed his own hair, did his own stick-n-poke tattoo, and even pierced his own tongue. Don’t do all that, folks.

- “ “… Juno got loud. Belligerent. More so than usual.” It reached out to fidget with the end of it’s tail, wringing it in it’s hand. “I-.. he-… Lawrence always had a smart mouth. Knew it would get him in trouble, but I-… he did it anyways.” Lydia saw his shoulders begin to lightly shake. “She grabbed the clothes iron. It hurt… so bad.” ” - It won’t really be specified in story what happened, so I will say it here: Juno was drunk as per usual, but so was Lawrence. Juno was saying rude things and Lawrence kept talking back. Juno got angry and decided to burn him with a clothes iron. He immediately packed his bags and left.

- “… couldn’t stay another second after that. He knew he’d die if he did.” - GOTCHA WITH ANOTHER “I Saw The TV Glow” REFERENCE!

- “There were many of what seemed to be Lawrence on the road for a few years. Pictures of random roadside attractions, at the signs of various towns, of him at bars and concerts and even camping in national parks. His hair varied in style and color, and dark circles were always present under his eyes. A concerning number of the photos had him with a bottle of half-drunk cheap vodka in his free hand. His clothes were always raggedy, and he always looked at least a little bit grungy.” - He didn’t have very much money, but what he did spend was on hair dye, tattoos, and alcohol. Hence why he was always dirty and in old clothing. He briefly joined a band and toured with them, but ditched them after a year or so to keep drifting.

- “One photo had him proudly showing off a bright green binder in the middle of a crowd of colorfully dressed people, his smile more genuine than it had been in any of the previous photos.” - Baby’s first Pride!!! He was 20.

- “Someone who sounded rather… sassy, let’s say.” - It’s Otho. I don’t know how to politely describe the way that man talks. It’s movie Otho, btw, not musical Otho!

- “… always were the most… potent out of all of us, little brother.” - I wonder what this means? Hmmm. Also misgendering wtf Otho

- “With that, the man turned on his heel, clacking away in his pristine black dress shoes until he rounded a distant corner. The sounds of his footsteps suddenly halted then.” - Otho teleported away once out of sight. Our Shoggoth can do that too! If it had enough energy and harmony with it’s host, which it does not.

Tag list: @raineisinkless @c0zmo-writes @musical-fiend @katslitterbox

(Want to be tagged in future updates for CorpseJuice / LoopJuice? Let me know!)

[justatalkingface]

I saw your post about Black Whip and I wanted to get your opinion on something that to me, is so damn obvious, but maybe I am looking at it differently than others.

When Midoriya is explained how Black Whip works, why isn’t the first thing in his head is, “Hey, I should talk and pick at Tokoyami’s brain to get some insight from him on how to keep it under control!”? Because when Banjo explained Black Whip, my mind immediately went, “That’s literally Dark Shadow, just not sentient.”

And it would have been a perfect segway into Tokoyami possibly becoming a more defined character if he’s hanging around Midoriya and they chat and Izuku gets to know Tokoyami better. Because for the most part, Tokoyami is around Hawks a lot, but he acts a bit like a blind fanboy to him and we never explore Tokoyami more, it’s always about Hawks.

Then it could have started a trend. When Midoriya unlocks Float, then introduce Uraraka into the meetings. And both her and Tokoyami can replace Bakugou because he was absolutely useless and obnoxious in Midoriya’s “training”. And for the other quirks, Midoriya will gradually gain his own circle of trust with OFA and the stored quirks through their help of similar quirks or advice from other brainy students like Yaoyorozu, Iida, and Todoroki. Such as how All Might had his own circle that knew the actual truth about OFA when he was it’s wielder.

I don’t know, I just think Horikoshi squandered an opportunity to flesh a few more prominent characters and instead stuck to the boring, tedious BakuDeku scenes.

*tilts head*

That... that is actually a really good point? I never thought of it, probably because he wasn't really even a character at that point, but it makes a lot of sense.

Both of them are dark, shapeshifting energy, and both of them require self control... somehow. Not quite sure how that works for Tokoyami since they never really got into how he 'self controls' a separate entity, but, damn. This would have been a great way to get into it. I mean, hell, in the war arc Izuku uses Black Whip to get past his body's limitations by supporting himself and cushioning impact of OFA (which I'm... eh on), but that's really similar to how Tokoyami uses his Quirk later on in the story with Black Abyss. That being a collaboration idea between them is great character development, and makes these newer power ideas feel more organic than they are when a big fight rolls around and Character X deploys New Power Y seemingly out of nowhere.

And using that as a segway into introducing OFA to the rest of the class, rather than just finding out in a note (I mean, considering how disconnected all of that felt by that point, I'm kind of confused to why Izuku even told them at that point, you know?)? Using Izuku as the glue to bind 1A together (like he was implied to at one point, before they stopped being relevent)? That's honestly inspired, it really is.

So much of the drama thus far in the Final Arc is built around 1A, but they're so out of focus, so undeveloped, and such strangers that it makes it all fall flat...er. But if we get an arc or two of Izuku binding them all together, making them relevent again, then the stakes would feel that much bigger to us (and you know, we could avoid the Dark Deku arc all together, or at least make it feel more... anything, really. And less dumb.)

Hori squandering opportunities to waste them utterly, or drop some fraction of the idea on someone else isn't a new thing, but damn, now I'm really regretting this was never a thing.

[darishima]

i'm sure somebody else has posted about this already but here's an analysis of all the wanted posters at the end of the new one piece live action trailer!!

alvida's the most obvious one of course. below hers you can see part of a foxy wanted poster, and another poster i'll get to later

this one was interesting, we're not gonna see bellamy this season, probably not even the next one (unless they change his introduction to be sooner?) but it was an awesome touch, his actor looks great

this one was FASCINATING actually, cavendish reveal THIS EARLY?? he's not gonna show up for another, like, 26 arcs. he was cast insanely well though like. god damn that really is cavendish couldn't have gotten a better actor

this, again, was really interesting? foxy's not gonna show up for a while either, why bother casting him now? what is shown of his face looks great, though, and by "great" i mean "absolutely fucking stupid." as it should

the wanted poster next to foxy is completely torn, but i'm pretty sure it's buggy? the poster is slightly blurry in the trailer so this is the best screencap of it i could get, but its clearly got some orange/red and a yellowish border like his hat, and i think those two tiny white spots by the black border might be the edge of his jolly roger?

here's a screencap of his hat from the same trailer, and it seems to match up. i mean, im doing this off a couple of pixels of color so it's hard to tell, but having his wanted poster up would make sense at this point in the story so i'm going with it

this poster is near cavendish's, and it's super small and only part of it is shown but it clearly says "ONG" so i'm pretty certain this is arlong's poster

this poster is by foxy's, and at first i thought it was another poster of bellamy but the shirt area doesn't seem to match up. comparing the blue background color and the white shirt stripe on the right side, it looks similar to arlong's poster, so i think it's another of him

this poster is below alvida's and uh. honestly i have no clue who this is. it doesn't look anything like the other posters we're shown in this shot and there's not nearly enough of it shown to make a guess on which character's it is, so idk. if you have an idea on who this could be please lmk in the reblogs/comments

i almost had a heart attack when i saw this propaganda poster, i saw "EAD DISEASE" and thought it said "amber lead disease" for half a second but no. it says "pirates spread disease" :( thought we were getting law foreshadowing </3

also, with cavendish, bellamy's, and foxy's posters all being shown this early, i wonder if their introduction will come sooner?? because like, the other posters are alvida, arlong, and buggy (probably), all characters who are prominent characters at this point in the story, but cavendish doesn't show up until DRESSROSA. why is he here? also, foxy's from the south blue, bellamy's from the north blue, and cavendish is from the grand line. why are their wanted posters in the east blue, and not somebody currently plot-relevant and location-relevant, like don krieg or other members of arlong's crew? the only reasons i can think of are that their introductions are changed to be much sooner. not sure how that would work with cavendish but it wouldn't be too hard to have foxy or bellamy show up sooner for some reason. or, the more likely reason, it's just easter eggs for the hardcore fans. like me. who spent way too long analyzing like three pixels of color to see if a wanted poster was buggy's. (which is really cool but the logic of why a northern, southern, and grand line pirates' wanted posters are here in the east blue doesn't really make any sense but hey)

also, look at koby <3 he's so cute i love him so much

[caatws]

Your comment about Gamora's death in comparison to Natasha has been on my mind lately too. I wasn't in love with how they initially handled it with Natasha, but I think eventually she got more closure than Gamora received in vol 3.

I don't know what direction they were going for but how do you have a prominent character in a team film die and only two other characters speak about it, worry over it and have any grief displayed. That's ludicrous to me. Even if you set the film a couple years later you can still have one or two emotional team conversations about it. You could have at least one more person struggling in a different way. The guardians being depicted as a family only makes the problem more obvious. Either everyone but Peter and Nebula are the worst family members ever or the writing sucks. When Gamora shows back up you would think there would be emotional fallout even years later. Only Peter seems to be aware or have any response besides Nebula who has been interacting with Gamora and maintaining their relationship. You would think this was a common every day occurrence for most of them.

The same issue effects Gamora's characterization and arc. Endgame showed her to be exactly like the Gamora from the first guardians movie if memory serves me right. We see she can be tough and harsh at times. But she can also show empathy, vulnerability and the will to do the right thing. Vol 3 acts as if none of this is part of her character anymore at first just because of living with the ravagers. I would buy that if not for the fact that there's no way everything that's made her who she is from years before would suddenly be gone and we already know from Kraglin and Yondu that ravagers don't lack the ability to care. You're telling me Gamora went from emotional and in tears about Thanos winning in the future during Endgame and wanting to stop him, to not wanting to even remotely help with the High Evolutionary at first in vol 3. That's so inconsistent it's like they forgot her characterization. Also Nebula was getting on Gamora for some of her actions as if she has room to talk. She wanted to blow up all of Zandar in the first movie and she was ready to leave people behind in vol 2. Did they forgot how Nebula behaved in previous films because pot meet kettle.

I haven't seen any of James Gunn's other films so I don't want to judge him too harshly but either he doesn't know how to write women in complex traumatic situations or he thought what he did was enough which is sad. He showed an afterlife in the film so couldn't he show Gamora at peace or have the Gamora who came to the future explore her feelings around it and bring closure that way.

i totally feel you anon. i've been a hater of natasha's ending this whole time as well, but now seeing how gamora's ending has been depicted (or rly a lack thereof lol) it's weirdly making me feel almost at peace with nat's death. bc it's like oh wow it could've been handled so much worse lol.

with nat my biggest problems were the fridging, her arc ending before she got to do more/have her own story, and her not getting a funeral with tony...truly just minor inconveniences now in comparison to what's happening over in gamora land lmfao

and yeah, i was honestly pretty surprised how much rougher around the edges this gamora seemed. like yeah the ravagers are pretty rough and tumble themselves but it caught me off-guard how much colder it seemed to make gamora, for lack of a better word i guess?? i don't doubt her being really harsh and terrifying in the past under thanos like nebula was saying, but yeah 2014!gamora is still the gamora who was like on the brink of betraying thanos. like even if this gamora hadn't gone through most of vol 1, she's still the gamora who already had one foot out the door so she could stop thanos bc she cared abt innocent lives, so it was a tad surprising to see her act so coldly toward the rest of the gotg or even rocket who was actively dying and would clearly be sorely missed by the others. like not super surprising or even super ooc to me, but just kinda surprising considering her appearance in endgame

like her cold shoulder toward peter i can get, bc it's clear that his baggage with original gamora is hurtful to her and i think that's more than fair. but since the narrative also establishes that peter is seemingly the only gotg character to even have this baggage at all, since the others don't even so much as mention missing or grieving original gamora, idk if she'd need to be such a hater toward them too lol.

and honestly i think her characterization would've made a lot more sense if the narrative had actually included the rest of the gotg's grief for original gamora and sorrow that this gamora isn't her. like, if not being the gamora this world expects her to be has been weighing down on gamora for years, i could see her rly becoming like this, cuz that's a whole lotta pressure she's never gonna live up to! that would be a great character conflict for her. but by erasing original gamora from the narrative outside of peter's grief, we can't even rly justify this gamora's behavior through this issue either

the only other gunn project i've watched is the suicide squad and i don't remember much of my thoughts on it besides generally enjoying it. but i think callie @starmora put it best yesterday when they said that gunn's always had favorites and gamora's never rly been one of them, especially compared to rocket, who gunn has been outspoken about seeing himself in most and being the hidden protagonist of sorts throughout the gotg franchise (to the point that even in the movie, lylla straight up tells rocket, "this story has been yours all along"), so it's unfortunately not surprising that gamora's arc has been...whatever this is. and like, idc that gunn's favorite is rocket bc that's fine and rocket's had a pretty solid story/arc (though i feel like there's something missing between iw when he lied abt being captain of the ship to impress thor to vol 3 where peter decides to make him captain, especially after rocket spent the entire film incapacitated), but it just sucks that it meant there wasn't much wiggle room to deal with the gamora situation

and also i 1000% agree - WE SHOULD'VE GOTTEN AN ORIGINAL GAMORA POST-END CREDIT SCENE!!!! i would've loved to see her like watching everyone dance to dog days are over or something from the afterlife and just kinda feeling satisfied with everything, despite the way things ended for her

[positivlyfocused]

Why People Create Tragedies For Themselves And Others

All beliefs create reality. It doesn’t matter if the belief is “true” or “false, “right” or “wrong”. In time, any belief will create reality consistent with it. Which explains the importance of positive focus.

So many examples prove this. It’s amazing so many continue thinking “you create your reality” is wishful thinking. When the world is awash in examples showing how people create their reality exactly this way. How? By focusing on a belief until the belief proves true.

One example sticks in my mind. It sticks for good reasons. One, because of the near-tragedy that could have ensued. And two, because the person involved, Edgar Maddison Welch, believed a preposterous story. A story which he believed so strongly, he acted as though it were true.

Because for him, it was true. Today, Welch regrets taking action on such preposterously false ideas. That didn’t help him though on December 4, 2016.

Pizza…and pedophiles

The idea involved politicians, pizza and a certain taboo. Someone concocted a now widely discredited conspiracy linking prominent democrats and restaurants with human trafficking and child sex. Just to reiterate: so many media outlets have discredited the story. Including Fox News.

Yet, the story quickly went viral. The owner of one restaurant falsely claimed to be involved said he and his employees were constantly threatened:

Again, not one aspect of the conspiracy proved true. And yet, many, many people acted as though they were true. In other words, their beliefs, amplified by several negative emotions, including frustration, insecurity and fear, didn’t allow them to see obvious evidence disproving the conspiracy.

Even false beliefs will occur as true. If the people think the belief long enough, frequently enough, evidence will quickly begin accumulating. The evidence could occur as wildly off base to others. But people thinking the beliefs will discredit the disproving evidence in favor of the [false] evidence. In time, the beliefs will draw so much “proof” the people’s behaviors will align with the beliefs. Then the belief, for practical purposes is “true” to the believer. Then those who get caught up in the created reality suffer tragedies. The belief becomes true for them too in experiential terms.

This is how tragedies happen. And this is how the near-disaster related to Pizzagate happened too. Which brings us back to Welch.

A near mass shooting

For Welch, 24, these false conspiracies were true. So much so, he felt he must act. So he left his home in North Carolina. He headed north to a restaurant purported to be part of the conspiracy. He brought an assault rifle with him. Planning to “investigate the conspiracy,” Welch fired three shots into the restaurant. Luckily, the bullets hit no one.

Later, when police arrested him, Welch saw himself as, in his own words, “…the potential hero of the story—a rescuer of children”, as told to the Skeptical Inquirer. While no one was hurt, the outcome could have been different.

Welch’s experience and so many more illustrate how any belief can become true. Even flawed ones. This explains why it’s so important that people understand how “thoughts become things,” as Abraham puts it.

In fact, a recent email from them makes this very clear:

^^Abraham once again making it plain.

It can go either way

What’s really great about situations like this is, if flawed premises can create “truth”, what about premises based on the how the Universe actually works?

I mean, if all beliefs will eventually prove true, then it seems it behooves people to focus on beliefs consistent with what they want to experience, right? That’s the premise of the Positively Focused approach. The Charmed Life, the life I write about here constantly, is nothing other than a premise based on how the Universe actually works.

That means, so long as one believes in accordance with how the Universe works and how it’s oriented, they can create any “truth” they like. And that means the world can contain ANY belief. Any belief held long enough will prove true. So why not make your truth something you’d prefer? Rather than a truth you’d not prefer?

That’s what I show my clients every week. How to create “truths” they want to experience. When those truths become overwhelming, then they experience their own version of the Charmed Life. From there, life gets really fun.

Life can go either way. I say, why not make it go the way you want?

[byfurries4furries]

Shelter (Fantasy Visual Novel)

Shelter, made by Rausmutt, is a complicated game. It doesn't neatly fit into any particular genre. It's a dramatic fantasy scifi action porn comedy, if I were to label it, which, as you can tell, isn't an easy task. There's a lot to like about this game and a lot of disparate elements that come together to form a tight cohesive whole, but one that's not too tight for a knot.

Shelter is about a human named Luke who helps run a shelter where canine adventurers can stay and relax at. A holiday called Skies Ablaze is coming up and for various reasons, Luke spends it alone every time, but he finally finds a way to celebrate it with his closest friends. He plans to spend that night with them, but until then, he needs to pick someone to spend the rest of the day with.

Now... I could make an entire essay about what makes Shelter so good. I'd say it's probably the first furry visual novel not mostly or entirely written by Howly, who wrote Adastra, Arches, and most of Echo, that has felt this thematically and tonally rich. But unlike a lot of games in this genre, it does not try to mimic Howly, but still manages to tap into his strengths. There's strong messages about racism, exoticism, the meaning of freedom, the harms of hero worship, the difficulties of fighting hierarchies both in practice and concept, self-care vs altruism, and the fear of mortality. There's also hints at autism allegories and anarchist principles that may be unintentional, but are so well integrated into the setting and story that they feel like natural extensions of the more prominent themes.

But this isn't to say Shelter is entirely serious. It's also an extremely silly and horny game, full of dog puns and meta humor. That fact is obvious if you play the first hour or so, especially if you manage to get a bad ending. And to that end, it's really effective. It's very funny and charming and silly. And that in itself is integrated into the more serious elements. Rune is by far the silliest and horniest of the route characters, but he got that way because he fought and sacrificed A LOT to have the freedom to be that way, and you can see that from the beginning as he's the most physically scarred character in the main cast. His hedonism and goofiness is his way of enjoying the freedom he fought for.

But if there's one thing that stands out about Shelter, it's its gameplay. I know it's weird to praise a visual novel with mostly dialogue choices, quick-time events, and one somewhat confusing minigame for its gameplay, but most furry visual novels often only have dialogue choices as opportunities for interactivity and even some really good ones like Arches and Remember the Flowers don't even have that. I'm not criticizing those games for doing that though, as focusing on story and even abandoning dialogue choices has many of its own advantages, but the fact Shelter branches as much as it does really makes it stand out a lot, especially since it's still so tightly written. Because of that, I rarely use any save slots at all. I certainly save sometimes out of a nagging feeling I should, but even then, I rarely load up a saved state ever. There's so many branching paths of events to do. A lot of side quests and unlockables and hidden scenes. My favorite thing to do is boot up the game from the beginning and do slightly different dialogue choices until I get to the part I left off at in my last session. I have nearly completed everything available in the last update (v33) and I only very recently got through enough branching dialogue to safely keep a save file of the moment right before the route split. It's truly fun to have a visual novel open ended enough that I can have unlockables and completionist challenges to do. It's really a fun game on top of being a great story, especially since diverging branches are written around each other later. There are a handful of continuity mistakes, but given how complicated that is to keep track of for a story of this nature, it's impressive there aren't way more. And that's all without sacrificing the story or the core themes. In fact, I believe those act as the anchor for the game's narrative.

Overall, Shelter is an amazing game. If it weren't for how extremely NSFW this game is, I would give it my highest recommendation. In fact, I will, at least for anyone who's 18+ and isn't squeamish about gay sex and descriptions of gore. It might be my new favorite game, at least depending on how it ends up. It's currently unfinished, but it is possible to get to Burry's and Rune's good endings and Max's route is shaping up to be my favorite one with some surprising themes of mutual aid, capitalist realism (or maybe more broadly hierarchal realism), and the meaning of justice. Both of the multi-route side quests have unfinished best endings, and there are a few more unfinished branching dialogue choices. But you can go 30 hours without running out of stuff to do as it is and it might be more if you're not like me and don't skip action and sex scenes because you just can't get yourself to enjoy them when they're written out in most media, mostly due to issues with visualization skills and not really due to any fault of the authors. And with that rant about oddly specific personal stuff out of the way, keep on yiffing.

Links

Itch.io

Side Tangent: This game is so shockingly gay that the biggest twist that shook me the most is the singular instance of a feminine pronoun. There's no female characters and although even tamer characters still tend to talk about sex a lot, straight sex doesn't get mentioned at all and neither do any females, with the sole exception of this reveal. Or at least there were no other incidents that stood out. But it's safe to say Shelter fails the Bechdel test hard, so much so that it's a mystery if there are even any women in its world at all.

[twistedtummies2]

The Price May Be Right - Number 25

Welcome to “The Price May Be Right!” I’m counting down My Top 31 Favorite Vincent Price Performances & Appearances! The countdown will cover movies, TV productions, and many more forms of media. Today’s pick is a classic mystery tale, with Price playing a significant role in the proceedings. Number 25 is…Shelby Carpenter, from Laura.

Our previous spot on the countdown was the murder mystery “House of the Long Shadows.” Strangely enough, today’s entry is ALSO a role Vincent played in a murder mystery feature. “Laura” – the 1944 film noir “Whodunnit?” - is widely considered a classic of the genre. It’s easily one of my favorites among such pictures, and that’s saying a lot. The plot begins with the apparent murder of the titular character, Laura Hunt: a glamorous heiress and the ambitious head of an advertising agency. After Laura is discovered shot to death in her apartment, New York City detective Mark McPherson (played by Dana Andrews) goes on a quest to solve her case…a case that he quickly grows obsessed with, to the point where some start to believe the sleuth is actually falling in love with a woman that is already dead. Things only get more complicated when it’s revealed – SPOILER ALERT – Laura is actually still alive! Evidently, the person found dead was an employee of hers. Now, McPherson’s case takes an all new twist, as it seems the person who killed Laura’s employee may still want the real Laura dead. Price’s role in the film is that of Laura’s fiancé, Shelby Carpenter. While he’s charming, good-humored, and often seems rather lost with all the mayhem around him, he’s also something of a human parasite: it becomes obvious very quickly that Carpenter is really only interested in Laura because of her money. He, himself, is in a heap of debt; despite supposedly coming from a wealthy family, he has squandered most of his own fortune on frivolity, and now is desperately seeking a way to regain his funds and climb his way back up the social ladder. Carpenter is something of a red herring in the picture, as his need for money and penchant for womanizing could easily lead to a couple motivations for murdering Laura, especially when it is ultimately discovered she really doesn’t love him. Vincent often said this was one of his favorite movies, and it’s not hard to see why. While his role is ultimately that of a mere supporting player, this is one of a few parts from the earlier days of his career that can be seen as a stepping stone for his path in life to come. Carpenter is a romantic and princely figure, in some ways, but he’s also shady and unscrupulous. He flip-flops between being a loveable sort of scoundrel and an unsettling figure of suspicion throughout the picture. Price, at this time, was still mostly known for his work in romantic comedies and period costume dramas; playing the Red Herring figure in a good ol’ fashioned murder mystery can easily be seen as a sort of crossroads for the kinds of movies he’d do later on. Really, it’s the classic status of “Laura,” as a movie, that gives Price’s appearance here such power. For him, it was one of the most important films in his career, helping to get him more attention from audiences and critics alike than perhaps any movie he’d done up to that point, and the picture – as a whole – has proved influential on many other stories in the same genre since. It’s fair to say that Price’s performance as the loafing Shelby Carpenter helps the picture in some fashion. Ultimately, I just felt other roles were more prominent, in some fashion, and therefore felt I couldn’t place this part any higher on the countdown. Tomorrow, the countdown continues with my pick for Number 24!

[tagedeszorns]

You've already very correctly noted that, unlike you, I have an absolute Fabius-Atheist-attitude to the old GW lore. I don't believe in an intelligent design, but in a bunch of guys who just turned completely whacky ideas that came up in their drunken heads late at night into a game. Who then later, surprised by their success, just bullshitted explanations all over the place. So that it would fit together somewhere. So that the machine doesn't squeak too much.

I base this on the fact that I used to stand around the tables at cons in the nineties and watch the big boys play tabletop games. And Warhammer was always the wacky, colourful, fun game (Orks with trucks!!!!). If you wanted a serious background, you played Battletech. Warhammer was fun and madness. In the best sense!

In my perception, it only really got serious when they tried to sort the Heresy together.

And this is the moment when I want to come around the corner with a Star Wars analogy! Because Star Wars also has the idolised (not by me) origin trilogy. The founding myth. But it only holds up if you keep making the craziest twists and turns to explain away every piece of bullshit. The most prominent example here is surely the Kessel Run. The amount of mental gymnastics fans made to explain why parsecs are a unit of time not space is phantastic! If you read through what George Lucas had actually planned, you will feel horrible.

I definitely only became a fan when what is now the Extended Universe came along. Cool books, great comics, tabletop RPGs. That had consistency, that was thought out. I can live with retcons (even though I really, really miss the old Boba Fett!), but when it fits, it fits!

And it's the same with Warhammer: I don't want all that Oldhammer stuff at all. Give me the Heresy books as a solid foundation and as a point at which I can start taking even newer 40k lore seriously.

Give me carefully inserted "unreliable narrators" that still tell a complete story! Of course, an Imperial scribe might describe Fabius as a child-eating monster with five heads and twenty arms - but then that's obvious from the start. That everything is coloured. That the madness has a propagandistic background. That doesn't have to be patched in afterwards as a lame explanation for a sudden change of direction. Madness comes straight out of the box, so to speak, with method!

We will always disagree on this - and that's fantastic! Because it can't get much more in the spirit of the guys who created a completely crazy universe just for fun! Everyone can find something that excites them. Even completely contrary things. And that's what we're doing.

And another volte-face in the direction of Fabius: whether he was just a name at the beginning and the whole Frankenstein-Mengele superstructure only came gradually doesn't matter for that. What he always retained was the noble lineage. For that is precisely the literal translation of his name: The Noble. Perhaps only intended as irony at the beginning, this can be found in many of the Emperor's Children - even if Lucius (the radiant/luminous) is not exactly the brightest candle on the cake. Eidolon was possibly the first to really go in the Slaaneshi direction with his name. If, indeed, they had anything in mind at all! And there we have come full circle and we are once again happily running around past and future!

Let's have fun with the current version of our terrible guys!

Also, Fabio is an icon! Not only the reference-guy for roughly 99% of all "shirtless guy holds woman in period dress"-romance novel-covers, but also playing the part of the pope in Sharknado 5 and that's some damn impressive achievement-list!

I can't sleep because I found out that Fabius Bile is like one of the oldest named characters both in lore and in real life, he is in Slaves to Darkness from 1988.

He is from an age when Leman Russ was a space marine. He is older than Abaddon.

He is from an age when Horus wasn't the emperor's son, but only his most trusted general.

I don't have enough free RAM in my brain to process this. Reading this book was a mistake. I feel like a poor neophyte librarian stumbling over forbidden lore, and now chaos has taken a hold in me.

[antique-forvalaka]

KinnPorsche and the Use of Colour

Episode 1; Major Players (Porsche)

Ive been thinking a lot about the way colour is used in KinnPorsche, ever since i’ve seen the trailer for the first time a few weeks ago. But by virtue of colour often being on the more subtle end of the spectrum when it comes to setting (most) scenes, it took me a while to come up with my preliminary opinions. Since colours are used all the time throughout the show, and we only know the one episode (+trailer) so far, my theories in here will be very likely to get refined the further we get along in the story. So please take this as a disclaimer that most of what i am going to be outlining here is based on very limited information right now. Please also keep in mind that not every coloured light/object needs to have a set meaning, and a lot will likely just be set dressing.

Porsche

So lets start this off with one of our Protagonists! Porsche here is  shown for the very first time backlit in blue and pink (and a cheecky little spotlight just for him, as a treat). This colour scheme might be familiar , because yes, you saw right; these really are the colours of the Bisexuality Flag. Coincidence? I think not!

Also important is the prominent blue patch to the right. Most often when we see blue it is associated with Porsche, often to foreshadow or to show his presence in a scene, be that direct or indirect.

For example in this shot, which shows the entrance to the backstage area where Kinn meets Porsche for the first time. We see Kinn quite literally enter his territory so to speak. Even Kinn’s way here is speckled with blue,  most obvious is the small shack Kinn and Big hide out in to escape their pursuers.

Of note is also the green creeping in on the right side of the frame, but more on that later.

For now lets focus on something else.

This is very significant! See how the light changes to blue the exact moment Kinn agrees to Porsche’s demands in exchange for protection? The exact same thing happens just a few seconds later, after a short second of hesitation. Presumably this is the moment he actually comes to the decision to help. (Though he does undercut this by then immediately getting a bottle to take a short toilet break…)

But what does all that mean?

Well, lets talk about the colour blue for a bit. It’s most often used as shorthand for strength of character (think every stereotypical hero ever) and competence. I’d say Porsche fits both of these reasonably well. What he doesn’t fit however, is the association with calmness. What little we have seen of him so far suggests a very spontaneous personality and a penchant for chaos, which to me is a very interesting difference. He does seem weirdly laid back at times, so i guess we can consider that as his calming influence if we want to reach… Blue is also often associated with sadness and depression, neither of which i would attribute to Porsche with any weight.

However, most of the time he is associated specifically with neon blue and bright saturated lights, which to me is a departure form the conservative interpretation anyways. It lends him a very energetic undertone and is a good tie-in to his background as a bartender, and imo fits his character well. 

I’d recommend everyone to try and pay attention to the colour choices on their next rewatch as well, it is very interesting to see who pops up when! :)

Seeing as this has already balooned away from me, i have decided to split them up into several parts, each focusing on one particular colour. 

So up next! Green and Gold, feat. Dangerous situations and our resident Mafia Heir, Kinn.

Find more KinnPorsche colour analyis here:

Major Players: Kinn

The Intersection of Kinn and Porsche / Green

Kinn’s Colour: A revision

Episode 2; Significant Scenes

Episode 3; Significant Scenes (+Tankhun)

Episode 4; Significant Scenes

Episode 5; Significant Scenes

Extra: Hidden Messages YT Video

Big shoutout to @moerusai​ for lending me her gifmaking skills for the purposes of this analysis, as well as @luckydragon10​​ and @fractured-ice​​ for inspiring this!

Nemi also made some very good observations about the lines of power in the first episode, please check that out as well!

[maxbegone]

hi! I hope I’m not overstepping but you mention grief a lot with lone star this season and I saw your reblog of 308 and how you appreciated it. It’s really been such a prominent thing for TK this season and I just wanted to see if you could talk about it more? Again I’m sorry if I’m overstepping!!

hi! you're not overstepping. i personally find this really cathartic to talk about. my fear is that i'm talking too much about it, but i've found so much comfort and familiarity in season 3 with this overarching plot line that this is my way to process.

season 3's subtitle should literally be "grief" because we're seeing it from the get-go. i'm going to talk about tk for a minute before i get into the fact that he is in no way the only one grieving — and said grieving is not just about death. and i don’t think i can fully do this justice without acknowledging the prominence of grief in every character this season. 

i kind of went all out on this this is going to be long, so i'm going to drop all of this under the cut. special thanks to @doublel27 for taking a quick look at this.

way back in the pilot, when we meet judd, it's on the back-end of a tremendous loss and accompanied by so much trauma. he lost his entire crew to an explosion on a call and we watch him process it throughout the entirety of the first season. we get bits and pieces as the series goes on, but for the most part the currentness of it remains in season one.

now, let's jump to the obvious grief this season — tk and gwyn. all of 3.08 was about tk processing losing his mom so suddenly. he kind of blinked and she was gone without realizing, only to find out however many hours later. as someone who has been through this sort of immense shock very recently (funnily enough, this episode aired just around a year after i lost a parent), it's an interesting thing to think about. you're just going about your day when suddenly you get this news that completely rocks you and changes you forever. i've written about this ad nauseam, but i wasn't kidding when i said i can keep going.

i find 3.08 so heart-wrenching and raw, just like it's meant to be, but also so comforting. these are characters, sure, but i see myself in this story, i feel the fatigue, the shock, the numbness, the pain. it is, truly, a beautiful depiction of grief and one of the most beautiful episodes of television (take that with a grain of salt, i do not watch a lot of tv). not only is he grieving the loss of his mother, but he’s grieving the loss of jonah’s mother — his little brother will never grow up with her, and now it’s up to him to show him everything she’s taught tk over the years. they’re going to go through that together.

something i truly appreciate about tk's grief especially is that the writers didn't tie it off with a neat little bow at the end of the episode. they so easily could have, but instead they it carried on somewhat prominently throughout the following, and we see featured it again in 3.13 and 3.18. gwyn was tk's lifeline. she was his guide, just as much as owen has been, but she was always there. now that's not to say owen wasn't later on, but the relationship tk has with his father is surrounded by work. neither of them are great communicators, and we learn this season a little more as to why, particularly with owen.

grief not in death:

alright, this might take a minute to explain, so bear with me. but something i've recognized in the last year is that grief is not synonymous with death — you can grieve the loss of a friendship, lost time, loss of a childhood home, etcetera, and we see that with all of the characters this season.

owen: in the beginning of the season, we find out that he's absconded to hill country, tucked himself away in a cabin and is avoiding all of his problems back in austin because he feels he's failed the 126. he mentions this in the waiting room of the icu in the beginning of 3.04. he’s terrified, and during the sequence later on in the episode, he becomes so overwhelmed he collapses out in the snow. as the season goes on, we see him suppressing more and more of his anger, only to have the harsh reality of what it might become blown up in his face in 3.14. this is due to years of suppressed grief. yes, he's grieving gwyn — how could he not? she was the love of his life, she made him a better person, she's the mother to their son — but come 3.16 and we discover owen lost his brother at a very young age and fully blames himself. his family falls apart, he and his mother move to new york, his relationship with his father is non-existent, and when the time comes to confront him in hospice, he discovers his father's new family. it hurts, of course it hurts, but that doesn't mean owen isn't grieving then, too. if robert hadn't encouraged his father's second wife to leave the room, owen might not have had a chance to say what he wanted. and a really important beat in this episode, while short, is the facetime conversation he has with tk. they both acknowledge the fact that their relationship has been strained and promise each other that they're going to work on fixing it. there is grief there — you can't tell me these two hadn't been grieving the closeness they once had prior to that moment.

tk: i already mentioned gwyn, which is the most prominent version of his grief, but there are several other instances. he and carlos are broken up in the beginning of the season and there is no way he isn’t grieving that. he got scared, blew it up, and ran. come the end of 3.12 and into 3.13, he’s grieving the loss of his sobriety, his loss of choice. all of 3.13 is about tk coming to terms with this and restarting his sobriety, all while carlos learns to take a step back. this is his first time going through it without his mom, and he needs to learn to navigate this part of his world without her, too. during that call in the same episode when that boy watches his mom die and becomes nearly inconsolable, tk falls right back into his grief. he pulls out old photo albums, stares at them, and says he would give anything to be as happy as he was in those photos. it’s a beautiful, painful thing. it strikes deep. fast-forward to 3.18, and we see the grief come in again with the harrowing idea that he might lose his dad — either in the building collapse or to cancer. it’s even in his proposal to carlos: “my life has been scarred with loss.” so while tk’s grief is absolutely the most prominent this season, we can’t just lump it solely about gwyn’s death. 

carlos: absolutely, he’s grieving. like i said before with tk, he’s also grieving the loss of their relationship. he wasn’t given any real explanation when trying to surprise tk, only to have it blow up, and suddenly he’s left heartbroken in the home he bought for them to build a life together. nancy asks him to come to the hospital because tk wants to speak to him, only to discover that he’s suffered hypothermia and is in a coma, rapidly heading in the wrong direction. by body language alone, we see the numbness in carlos’ grief, because he begins to mourn the loss of tk before he’s even gone. everyone in the 126, near and far, is grieving tk while they wait on bated breath, but more than anyone else, it’s carlos (and, of course, owen.) andrea shows up, encourages him not to give up hope, to speak to tk even though he might not hear, and that grief and fear is gone once he wakes up. we see it again a little bit in 3.08, grieving with tk over the loss of his mother, for tk when no one is sure the plane will land. in 3.11, it could be argued that carlos is grieving the choice he made deploying his taser on the suspect at the beginning of the episode. it lead to his death since he fell on a kitchen knife, but there’s also a lot of anger and frustration (that he doesn’t fully admit to) as he and grace investigate further into what went down. 

grace: hers is a little less evident, save for what we see in 3.11. she’s angry, yes, because she and carlos got played, but she’s grieving the loss of the victim of a prank, too. yes, things work out in the end, but you can’t say that anger doesn’t coincide with grief. now, going back to 3.05 with the introduction of wyatt, judd’s son that he didn’t even know he had, she mentions she’s angry, that she shouldn’t be, but she is. this isn’t someone she would’ve ever known about, but there’s lost time in this relationship for judd and wyatt. is this grief? maybe not, but it could be read as such.

judd: yes there’s the old crew, but more of a focus this season is judd’s lost time with wyatt. he comes out of nowhere, shows up and rocks judd’s world, but he doesn’t write it off. in fact, he makes it a point to get to know this boy — his son. at first he’s convinced they have nothing in common, and sure, maybe they don’t at surface level, but the deeper into the relationship we get, the more we see it. they can both ride, they both get arrested for doing something dumb. gotta love that parallel. but wyatt mentions it first: he’s mad about the time they didn’t have together. and judd’s mad, too. so, this is grief; they’re grieving the loss of the time they could have had together in the past, but they’re going to make the most of it now. 

tommy: although her grief is much more prominent at the end of season 2 with charles’ death, it does carry into season 3 a little bit. she’s struggling with moving on, and a call to the curandera we meet back in season 1 with michelle, gives her the push to do that. the candles relighting at the end of 3.06 is something tommy needed to see. we watch her attend these grief groups, which she takes tk to at least once, we watch her step back into the dating life (however messy the second part of that is), and ultimately allow herself to not be as “buttoned-up” as she had been in the last year. it’s not like she isn’t going to grieve charles, because of course she is. that was her soulmate, the father of her children, her best friend. judd and grace give charlie that name in honor of him, an honor tommy sincerely loves, if evident at all by her reaction. she carries on at the end of the season, but she carries on with charles in mind.

paul: paul had some major developments this season. as a result of the hypothermia he suffers from in the beginning of the season, he develops a rare heart condition that very nearly kills him. he has the option to get a pacemaker implanted which will greatly increase his projected lifespan, but decides against it. this is his choice, one that marjan, his best friend, his ride or die, is distraught over. when she says he’s going to end up like his dad, who died from a heart attack at 36, paul responds with the wish that he could only be half the man his father was. they end up in a fight, and although she saves his life later in the episode when he goes into cardiac arrest, paul completely loses his choice because the doctors operated — thus implanting said pacemaker. that right there, and you can agree with me or not, is an avenue of grieving. paul is grieving his loss of choice (which easily mirrors with paul being trans and his loss of bodily autonomy he’s fought for), and he’s angry about it. he’s allowed to be, because marjan went against his wishes, and what we see in the following episode is paul spiraling. because the loss of choice has kind of moved to the back burner while grieving the loss of this incredibly important friendship takes the helm. he asks about marj but doesn’t reach out, and all the while she’s angry.

marjan: more than anyone else, she takes losing the 126 the hardest. but, she also fights the hardest. she’s out there putting herself at risk chaining herself to the station, resulting in her arrest, driving up to find owen and drag him back to austin, and deals with a (very) dirty cop. but more than anything else, she’s the only one showing up, and she’s mad about it. we hear her call multiple people “abandoners” throughout the season (the crew in general in the premiere, and mateo later on in parental guidance). she’s grieving the loss of her found family, of the firehouse she’s come to know and love where she uprooted her life to move to. a place she considers home. and now it’s turning to rubble. fast forward to the end of 3.04 and she has the single biggest smile of anyone at the 126. but when we move into the arc between 3.09 and 3.10, she’s furious. and although that’s true, she’s also grieving the loss of this best friendship. she’s waiting there fore paul to reach out when mateo alludes that maybe she should take the first step. marjan foresees several people abandoning her (mateo for the 129, and of course paul). once again, the 126 is falling apart like it was in the beginning of the season and she’s losing all hope. it works out in the end, but remember that there is anger in grief, and this was her way of showing it.

mateo: his is a little different. he’s not in the icu with the rest of the 126 when tk’s comatose, he’s instead working with judd and the 122. but when the captain from the 129, captain tatum, a man who treated him kind of shit while he was there, comes back into his life, mateo is witness to this man losing both his memory and a member of his house. he’s offered and accepts the position of lieutenant, steps in at the funeral when tatum can’t remember what to say, and deals with it when his mind goes and calls mateo probie, going back to the whole treating him like shit thing all because he wanted to protect him. in this instance, mateo is grieving second-hand, but in a similar way, he’s really not. this kid has a big heart and he just wants to help, which is exactly the reason he steps up to the plate. he wants to ease tatum’s pain, however invisible it might be. and when he has to make the difficult decision about reporting tatum to the fire chief about his dementia. ultimately, beautifully, tatum accepts and acknowledges that resigning is the right choice for his safety as well as others in a scene that parallels the beginning of the episode. a quick nod to 3.18 when owen gets caught in the collapse and mateo nearly loses it yelling for him, somewhat reminiscent of tk in 1.04. 

nancy: i wrote a whole thing about it already, and i have to give credit where credit is due to brianna baker, but nancy does lose her two best friends while on the job. she obviously loses tim in season 2 to volcanic debris on a call, but she also loses tk. she and tommy manage to get his heart started again out in the snow, but the whole thing is incredibly touch-and-go, resulting in so many unknowns and what-ifs while in the waiting room of the icu. imagine if she did lose tk permanently. i can’t say nancy would still be doing the job she does today. because while she wasn’t able to save tim, she was able to save tk. she’s still grieving tim, even if it’s not spoken or evident, because she’s human and it’s part of her character. that was her best friend. and as much as tk is as well, he’s still standing. in 3.12, after resuscitating a dnr patient despite seeing the bracelet saying otherwise, she decides to resign. tommy talks her out of it, to arrange something with the patient and her sister so they can have a conversation in spite of the lawsuit. but in this moment she’s grieving the loss of her livelihood, the reason she gets up every morning. nancy has only ever wanted to save lives, and while the decision was wrong and went against the patient’s wishes, she’s just trying to do what’s best. ultimately she doesn’t resign, but she mourns a little with the sister at the bottom of the episode. like most things this season, it does work out in the end, but we know it’s something nancy is going to carry with her.

alright. wow. that was...a lot. but, like i said, i have a lot of feelings on the matter. anon, i hope i didn’t lose you reading this (and to anyone else). 

if anyone would like to talk about this more, i would absolutely love to. 

[babylooneytoonz]

the Other Lane.

pairing : Clark Kent x Reader

requested by: @dashingcavill [Hope you like this! 💛]

warnings: Angst with a happy ending, and a lot of fluff in the end.

A/N: Ah, I'm really sorry I couldn't help but put some major angst in here, but I swear the ending is happy and I added the right amount of feels and fluff to make it hurt less. 💛

[The Masterlist]

You often wondered if you were born to your parents only to become a commodity that could be compared to your sister, Lois , at all times. Yes, the two of you were different, she had glamourous blonde hair and sparkling blue irises that made her strike out, while you had sombre [Y/H/C] hair and dull [Y/E/C] eyes that peeked out from the tint of your glasses. If the glasses weren't enough to fit you perfectly into the category that was termed as 'nerds', the fact that you loved to bury yourself into mounds and mounds of books, and literature was sure to fit you into that bill. All that comparison, but that didn't lessen the bond that you shared with Lois though.

However, things slowly started changing, the dynamics messing up when Clark Kent came into your life, as a friend and as a colleague.

Lois worked as a reporter for Daily Planet, and you, well you were mostly working in the background, struggling to make a run with your tiny little column on relationship advises. It wasn't like you were any less intelligent, but maybe you just were okay with how everything was going.

It didn't mean that there weren't times at all when Lois made you secretly jealous. To be fair, it didn't bother you when you heard stories of how Lois got herself into trouble yet again, with none other than the Superman came to her rescue. You could still take that, considering the fact that Superman took his duty towards the civilians as his topmost priority, but when you began noticing obvious changes in your sister's behaviour when she talked to Clark, his alter ego; your colleague at work, you couldn't help but start feeling the little pangs of jealousy.

It all began subtly— starting from lingering glances at the workplace, to hands brushing with each other's, almost innocently, yet the two of them had a sparkle in their eyes when it did. At first, you decided to ignore them at work, trying your best to not run into Clark Kent while you were in your office building. The reason for this was still inexplicably strange for you. You didn't even know the man that well, yet you could do nothing in your control to keep your budding feelings for him under check. It was like, the more you avoided Clark Kent, the more you began aching to get a glimpse of him.

As the days passed, you realized that your crush on Clark was slowly getting more prominent, and you started feeling scared, dreading if there ever came a day that your secret crush on him with finally be out. To top it up a notch, you wondered how Lois will react, knowing well aware that there was something blooming between the two of them, although she had never admitted this to you herself. Also, you kept hoping that whatever this was, between Clark and Lois, it was maybe all in your head and that maybe, just maybe, it wasn't even true, and you hoped it wasn't.

Soon, days grew into weeks and weeks flew by as long months, and you realized that what you felt for Clark wasn't just a silly crush, but you were actually falling in love with the man. It was the littlest things that he did that made your heart melt. You would, sometimes, run into him in the cafeteria, where he would be filling up his mug of coffee. He was a gentleman, he would smile and greet you warmly, your eyes meeting his sparkling bright ones as he would move out of the way and insist that you went ahead first. You would often end up taking elevator rides with him, and he would make sweet small talks with you, talking to you about everything, ranging from the weather to a possible alien invasion.

The plan that you had cooked up to avoid Clark Kent went down the drain from those days onwards. Instead, you almost began running into Clark almost everyday. The gossips about Clark and Lois had, by then, died down and you couldn't help but feel relieved, relieved that maybe you had just been dreaming, and there was nothing between Lois and Clark.

"Hey [Y/N], can I borrow your turtleneck? I can't seem to find mine?"

You looked up from the book that you had been binge reading on, flustered and embarassed, as you immediately tossed the book unceremoniously into your blanket. Of course, you couldn't let your sister in on the fact that you were secretly reading the fifty shades series. She would tease the living hell out of you. And then there was the fact that you felt ashamed of the fact that you could practically imagine Clark Kent in your mind as Christian Grey, and it was making you all heated up and bothered.

Lois raised an eyebrow when she saw you red you had turned, "Are you okay? You look like a massive human sized tomato."

"Gee, Lois, thanks?" You mumbled, still reeling from the way she had suddenly barged into your bedroom, as you pushed your glasses over the bridge of your nose, "couldn't bother to knock?"

"Since when do we do these formalities?" She wiggled her eyebrows dramatically, and dashed towards your closet, throwing it open as her fingers began working through the hangers, looking for what she was looking for. She was practically messing up your closet, so you sighed and decided to give her a helping hand. Abruptly, you slid out of the covers, forgetting about the novel that you had hidden underneath and the novel suddenly slipped off the side of the bed and fell to the floor, it's covering full on display.

You facepalmed, burying your face into your hands as Lois walked up to the book and picked it up, smirking obviously as she read out the title out loud just to tease you.

"Looks like my baby sister is finally growing her wings."

"Stop it, Lois. Don't embarass me," you grumbled, looking away. Instead, you dashed up to your closet and pushed her to the side, roughly pulling out your turtleneck as you handed it to her.

"Come on, [Y/N]" she laughed, shaking her head, messing up her perfectly styled blonde waves as she ran a hand through them, "We all have done this. You're not the only one. Nothing to be embarassed about. It's not like you're watching porn."

"It is technically still porn if I'm reading it," you whispered, watching her as she examined the turtleneck and smiled, as though she had pictured just the best trousers to go with it in the back of her mind as she absentmindedly replied back, "Again, sis, we all have done it."

You noticed the way she kept glancing at her phone, with a smile threatening to spill across her features. You raised your eyebrows and smacked your lips together, blinking curiously. She finally looked up and saw that you were staring at her so she grinned, "Guess who has a date tonight?"

"A date?" You asked, absentmindedly.

"Clark asked me out, [Y/N]. He is taking me to this really good Thai place that opened up in the suburbs and I just couldn't decide on what to wear!! This will just go perfectly with my jeans."

It happened so suddenly, but it still did. You felt like someone had just ripped your gut out with bare hands. You suddenly felt empty, was an understatement. You suddenly felt strange and cut off, and everything around you suddenly felt cold and distant and gloomy. You looked up at her, your earlier warmth having dissipated into a cold, dark look and you gave her a smile, biting your lip, "That's great, Lois. Have fun."

Lois noticed the way your face fell, but she couldn't understand or take the hint. She kept watching as you moved away, turning your back towards her and didn't utter another word. She parted her lips, wanting to ask her what had gone wrong suddenly, but decided not to, or rather, keep the discussion for another time. She didn't want Clark to reach before she had even gotten ready. You didn't step out of your bedroom, that night when Lois returned from her date with Clark, and Lois frowned when she saw that the lights to your bedroom were already switched off. You were a late sleeper.

Two months later,

Lois looked up from the article that she had been reading to find you enter the dining room with a breakfast plate in your hand.

"Mornin'," you mumbled, your voice barely audible as you sat down on a chair in front of her, next to your father, Sam Lane. Your father looked up from the newspaper that he was reading, and glanced at Lois who shrugged her shoulders in response and he cleared the throat.

"Honey, don't you think you've been locking yourself up in your room for long now? When was the last time you actually did something that didn't involve either the bed, or your office desk?" The cutting crispness in his voice was enough to slice through your heart, but weirdly, you felt nothing, ecen when you heard Lois gasp and mumble something to her father in protest.

"What do you want me to do, dad?" You asked, sipping your juice, your eyes fixed to your plate.

Ignoring you, Sam turned towards his elder daughter as he narrowed his eyes at her, his loud, booming voice echoing through your house, "Lois, what the hell happened at work? She just quit? And didn't even give a damn valid reason as to what on earth happened?"

"I don't know, dad. She hardly talks to me anymore," Lois replied.

You chuckled dryly to yourself, wondering when you had become so invisible to the world. You were right there with them and yet they regarded you like you weren't even there.

"It was difficult to get you job at the Daily Planet and look at you, throwing it away for whatever the hell the reason was." Your dad barked.

Your fingers clenched into a fist and Lois visibly tensed. Hurriedly, she stood up and announced that she was leaving. You stood up too, but not for work, but rather to go back to the place that you had locked yourself in for the past two months. When you reached the door, you turned around and regarded your father, mumbling, "Why would you care anyway? You never really did before."

You kicked open your room door and slammed it back shut again as you ran straight for your bed. You were trembling like a leaf trying to detach itself from the tree when you buried your face into the pillow and screamed as loudly as you could into it. You were a mess, a walking , talking, living, breathing mess.

You cried, for almost thirty minutes, until you were out of tears. You then sat up and rubbed your eye sockets, finally taking a deep breath. You were letting Clark and Lois affect you so much, you had forgotten what it was like to live normally. How were you supposed to go on like this? If you wouldn't take a command of your own life again, then how would learn to get back up on your feet? When would you learn to accept that you would never get Clark? He wasn't the one for you.

Feelings are so transient, it's like you can feel them slicing through your insides one minute, and then the other minute, you feel unrealistically numb.

With those sorts of destructive thoughts in your mind, you sneaked a bottle of whiskey that night from your father's liquor cabinet at two am at night. You rolled the window pane and snuck out onto the fire escape until you were climbing up towards the roof the building of your apartment, the bottle in tow.

You fixed yourself on the ledge, using your teeth to twist the bottle cap as you took a swig of it, feeling the warm liquid burn your relentless thirst for relief. Sip after sip, you kept staring at the starless sky, mediating your gaze from the sky down to the glittery buildings.

"Will I ever forget you, Clark Kent?" You whispered, into the thin air, laughing bitterly at yourself as you took the last sip from the bottle before it rolled away. The way the lights glimmered in front of you, and one of two cars drove past your building, looking like tiny little blinking lights from the height you were at, you realized one thing. No matter how bad your heart is broken, the world doesn’t stop for your grief.

You were lost in a turbulence of your own thoughts, so entangled into them, you didn't hear the soft thud somewhere behind you, neither the sound of the faintest footsteps that got closer to you, with every passing second. You took a sharp breath, and slowly stepped over the ledge, feeling shudders all over your frame as the winds hit you all over you. You footing, however, slipped, a sharp scream erupting from your lips as you fell backwards against gravity, your heart almost stopping.

Someone suddenly reached out towards you, gripping your wrist, leaving you hanging from the ledge, your body flailing in the air.

He pulled you with a jerk towards you, and your body hit his front, your hair falling all over your face partially covering it. You felt intoxicated, so much, that you had almost died by falling off the building but you didn't feel the scare, the only thing you felt was a sudden surge of adrenaline.

"WHAT THE HELL?!" Superman growled, through gritted teeth, his eyes sparkling as you jerked you by your shoulders.

"Clark? Is -- that you?!" You slurred, holding on to his cape tight to hold you in place. You were in a weird state of mind, you could see that it was him, but you couldn't figure out if it really was him, or if it was your mind that was playing an illusion on you.

"Are you trying to kill yourself?" Clark fumed, still holding on to you by the low of your back. He suddenly jumped off the ledge, with you in tow, away from the edge, so the two of you were in the middle of the roof now.

"K-Kill myself? No, I.. I.." You stammered, struggling for the right words but your brain felt frozen.

"Two months, and you don't show yourself. And when I finally see you, you're trying to jump off a fucking building?!" His eyes just then fell on the empty whiskey bottle. He growled, clenching his fists tight as he let go off you and walked up to the where the bottle lay, his cape flying behind him. He bent, lifting it up as he examined it, noticing how the neck of the bottle had your lipstick imprints on it. "And you're drunk. To top it up a notch."

Your nostrils flared in an anger you hadn't experienced ever before, your secret feelings finally crushing you completely, mixed with the alcohol that was rushing through your blood. You growled, like a cornered animal, that was wounded yet didn't want to back down. You pushed him, once, twice, throwing out all your pent up anger and frustration into his steely body like he felt no hurt. You screamed, you lashed, you scratched and you cried, finally coming undone, like beads of a rosary coming apart and scattering all over the floor.

Clark's heart broke at the sight of you. He had always seen you as a strong, happy woman, always smiling for him whenever he saw you at work. And this woman, that stood in front of his eyes right now, was far from it.

"I am not weak! I wouldn't kill myself! You give yourself too much importance, to think that someone would give their life for you!" You lashed out.

You were tired of hitting him like a punching bag. He grabbed you by your wrists, holding them together in front of you, pressed against his chest. He slowly moved, so he was towering over you, his back shielding you from unwanted, prying eyes as he gazed into your eyes, trying to find the answer to where all of this was coming from.

"You don't know what you're talking about. Come on, Lois is worried about you."

You couldn't stop yourself when your hand jerked itself free from his hold, and your palm struck his cheek. There was a crackling noise, of skin against skin, and tears formed in your eyes when the realisation hit you, all the intoxication washing off of you. You had just slapped Superman, a man that could snap your neck by grabbing your throat. Yet, he just stood there, too shocked to even register that you had slapped him right across his face and what was worse, he couldn't understand the reason you had done that. Anger was surfing through his veins, but worse than the anger that he was feeling, he was feeling like someone had pulled his heart out, ripping it to shreds right in front of his eyes.

"Why?" He let go off your other hand, his own palm coming to rest against his cheek as you gave you a look full of hurt.

"Why did you even save me, Clark? You should have let me fall. Atleast, it would have spared me the pain of listening to her name flow out of your lips again."

"Why do you hate her so much? She is your sister, [Y/N] and she cares for you. She worries that you're killing yourself and she doesn't know the reason why--" Clark was losing his temper, slowly but surely. He didn't understand you and that was eating him up.

"The reason why? WHY??! Oh Clark can you stop? And listen to yourself. I love Lois, but she needs to stop trying to govern my life. I'm allowed to feel sad, I'm allowed to feel a fucking heartbreak--" You didn't realise, but your lips were trembling now, your eyes leaking salty tears. You shivered when you felt Clark hold you by your shoulders but you didn't push his arms away.

"Who broke your heart?" He whispered, his voice cracking.

"You're fucking daft for a man who saves the world--" Hissing bitterly , you pushed yourself away from Clark's grip and turned towards the ledge but this time, you didn't try anything that would risk your life. You simply revelled in the cold feeling of the wind striking your tear stained face as you took a punctured breath, feeling Clark's breath on the side of your neck.

"Who broke your heart?" He asked again, but this time it was much softer, and it made you bite down on your lip to hold yourself from breaking into a hysterical crying.

"You did, Clark. You broke my heart." You finally whispered, staring into the abyss in front of you, your eyes cloudy and your throat parched as you continued, your lips trembling, "I loved you. Always did, but you never looked at me. It was always Lois. And it killed me, watching you love her, knowing that you will never love me the way you love her--" Clark let you speak, he wanted to listen to you, for you to let it all out, all those bitter things that you had locked up inside your mind, that was slowly eating you up and killing you from the inside. "I am tired of everyone, for you, for my father and for the world to see me as the Other Lane, as Lois Lane's little sister. My name is [Y/N]. I like to draw although I am shit at it, I can sing in the showers and I hate partying. That is me. I want a normal relationship too, but it seems that the world is against me. I fell in love with one man, and turns out, he isn't even human, he is a freaking superhero from Krypton?"

Clark let out a gruff sounding snort, as he looked down at you. Reluctantly, he reached for a strand of hair that was sticking to your tear coated cheek, removing it and gently tucking it behind your ear. He felt a shudder run down your spine, with just a gentle touch of his hand and he smiled, biting his lip. How was he supposed to tell you what the truth was?

"You remember how we met at the cafeteria every morning ? And I let you take the coffee?"

You nodded, listening to him, trying to control the crying that had now turned to sniffles, as Clark kept speaking.

"And the countless times I ran into that elevator with you and me stuck inside for just two floors?"

"You must have been thinking how weird I was. How unlike Lois--" You began, but you were cut off by Clark's voice.

"I used to wonder if there was anything I could do to make the elevators stop working, so I'd get to spend more time with you. Wretched elevators, not once did anything go according to what I wanted." He mumbled, but he had a small smile playing on his lips, while you just looked on, staring at him in disbelief, wondering if your mind was playing jokes with you once again.

"I thought I would take Lois' help, to you know, figure out if you felt the same way, but you never said anything to her."

"What about the date? Lois and you went on?" You asked.

"Well, I --" he shrug, looking down at his feet, sheepishly, " Lois thought you would confess how you felt for me if we pretended to--"

You were too numb to react; so you just blinked in retaliation. Your blood ran cold, and you suddenly felt light headed. All this while, while you had secretly been pining for Clark Kent to love you back, was it actually the other way round? Was Clark going through the same thing wondering if you felt the same for him?

"That was cowardly." You hissed, through pursed lips, "Trying to pretend to be in love with my sister."

"I was in love with the other Lane," he bit his lip, his face slightly inclined towards you, so he was looking down at you, and you up at him, "I think you are amazing. You are intelligent, and smart. And you're unique. There are these little things I adore about you. The way you greeted everyone whenever I was around-- ranging from the security guard, to the building keepers at the Daily Planet.. the way you forgot to wipe your lips after drinking coffee, and you had this froth all over your upper lip giving you a faint moustache?" He chuckled because you literally let out a gasp, suddenly embarassed.

"Then there were those days you had a bad day and you locked yourself up in your cabin, working all day. I wondered if I should just knock, but I was scared you will tell me off--" he continued, his blues peeking into yours. Your stomach fluttering, you couldn't help but laugh, as though a weight had been lifted off your chest suddenly and held him steady with your hand on his arm. Finally mustering enough courage, you pushed yourself on your toes, and reached up, letting your palm graze delicately over his cheek, caressing his cheekbone with your thumb, "I would have never told you off, Clark. Though that's not what is bothering me right now."

"What is ?" He asked, innocently, relaxing under the touch of your thumb.

"You said you're in love with the other Lane, Clark."

His lips creased, slowly tugging upwards into a smile that was enough to make you feel giddy. Superman wrapped a sturdy arm around you and felt yourself being lifted off, until he was practically holding you in his arms, "Mhm, yep? You got a problem, Miss Lane? Or do Kryptonians don't fit the bill ?"

"Oh, hush, Clark. You're such a dork. But will you be.. my dork?" You bit your lip, holding on to him as though your life depended on it.

"I thought... you'd never ask?" He began, unsure of how to properly weave the complexity of his feelings , churn them into words, something only Clark Kent was good at , and not his alter ego, but found himself halted by the soft press of your index finger against his lips and the sweet whisper of your voice against his ears as he held you close.

“I know, neither did I.” You whispered as he clasped your face in his massive hands and gently touched his lips to yours.

Three years later,

This had probably been the longest that Clark Kent had been away from you, his lover, his best friend, his wife-- four months to be exact. Needless to say, he was excited to be able to see you again, to hold you again.

The familiar silhouette of the cottage on top of the hill came into his view, flowers hanging into tiny earthen pots hanging out on the front porch. The freshly painted white picket fence looked beautiful, and inviting as Lois stood with Martha by the gate, both the ladies sipping tea from their respective cups and saucers. They couldn't contain their smiles when they saw Clark, even though he was covered in what looked like grime and blown up alien intestines?

"I don't even want to know what happened," Lois chuckled, while Martha hugged her son and he kissed the side of her cheek before she scrunched up her nose in disgust at how awful he smelled.

"Well, I guess I'll draw you a bath, you two can talk out here until the baths ready." Both Clark and Lois watched as Martha Kent disappeared into the home and he smiled, when Lois spoke again.

"FYI, she is at the orchard, harvesting the apples for an apple pie," Lois gave him a smug look, fluttering her lashes, "Oh don't pretend you don't want to see her. I can see your eyes darting around, trying to find her. I'll be inside, both of you, just come back in for supper."

He nodded, watching Lois leave and slowly, his fists clenched on either of his sides, he found his way into the tiny orchard that his lovely wife loved to spend most of her time at. He fixed himself by the wooden gate, his eyes admiring you from afar, as you stood on your tiptoes and picked out apples, tossing them into the basket that you held in your arm.

"Need help, Mrs. Kent?"

The basket dropped from your hand as you turned towards the source of the voice, your lips parted in shock. Clark's eyes travelled from you down to your beautiful swollen bump that your loose maternity dress was doing nothing to hide. He chuckled at your response as he walked towards you with longer, faster steps while you simply waddled towards him.

"Jesus, Clark-- I thought you'd miss the birth," you cupped your husband's cheeks in between your swollen fingers as he nuzzled his nose against yours, before kissing you.

"How is my monkey?" He brought his palm to rest against your nine month old baby bump, stroking over the fabric as he whispered against your lips.

"Moving around, not letting me get an ounce of sleep," you smiled, letting your fingers rest over his hand that rested against your stomach, "but I cant really complain now, can I? After all the little nugget's got Kryptonian blood running through their veins."

Clark chuckled, his blue eyes crinkling slightly as he knelt down in front of you, his face in line with the base of your bump as he planted a kiss on the curve of it.

"Come on, Kal Jr, will you stop bothering your mom? She needs all the sleep she can before you push your way into the world and steal our goodnight sleeps for a while," you smiled warmly, as you peered down at him, running your fingers through his hair and he looked up at you, planting another kiss against your bump.

You suddenly frowned and looked at the brown mess on your fingers that stank.

"God, Clark? What the hell? Did you seriously take a dive in a shit pool?"

He chuckled as he pulled himself up again and his hand once again found the base of your stomach to lay his hand protectively upon.

"Alien blood. You should have seen the intestines that covered me. It looked like noddles dipped in black bean sauce and meatballs--" You smacked him hard against the chest to shut him up, but instead he began laughing, his laughter rumbling out of his stomach as you began dragging him inside with his stained cape.

[the-lone-witch-and-secret-room]

The Owl House and pacing, a perspective from a fanfic writer that works with a large cast

I’ve seen a bunch of complains about the way The Owl House is paced lately. People claiming that it’s bad writing, and rushed, and whatnot. But from how I see it, you’re complaining for all the wrong reasons, and to the wrong people.

TL;DR: this is an overlaying issue with Disney and the industry that doesn’t allow long shows anymore, essentially forcing writers to pick between good pacing and complex stories being told with large casts.

For context: the fandom I wrote for before I got into The Owl House had a pretty small main cast. There were a few reoccurring characters, but most of them only showed up like five total times over the course of four seasons or had little personality, so my main cast I was writing about always consisted of my main five characters, with occasional cameos here and there. All characters were living together and experienced the adventure from the same perspective. There was one overarching storyline and not multiple. The interpersonal relationships still varied, though, for obvious reasons.

Now think about how large The Owl House cast is, and why that’d send them running into issues. Or don’t, because I have a whole-ass in depth analysis under the cut because this got unreasonably long.

(Also I’d appreciate a reblog, I spent… an unreasonable amount of time on this, lol)

The Owl House is different. There’s the main characters: Luz, Eda, King, maybe Hooty, technically (someone recently pointed out that he’s technically the titular character of the show and I’m still processing that, lol).

But they also have a HUGE additional cast to work with. There’s Lilith, Eda’s sister, and the main antagonist of season one, who has a lot to her character and gets a ton of screen time. There’s Amity, and there’s Willow and Gus, Luz’s friends. They’re all very fleshed out characters, and got a bunch of screen time and development, despite “only” being reoccurring characters and not the main characters.

Then there’s characters that have played a fairly minor role so far. There’s Belos, the big bad villain, who we will likely learn a lot more about this season. There’s the Golden Guard, the new main antagonist our cast deals with personally, who we’re just starting to learn more about. There’s Camila, Luz’s mom, who, despite only showing up a couple of times in the show so far, is very relevant to Luz and how the plot will ultimately turn out. There’s Edric and Emira, Amity’s siblings, who despite only showing up a few times as well seem to have a very worked out personality and background and also have a story that is (at least to some extent) going to be told according to the AMA.

There is at least one more seemingly important character whose role in the bigger story is hard to tell at this point, Raine, but according to the description of the episode, they’re probably going to influence the story a bunch.

There’s Alador and Odalia, who are responsible for a lot of their children’s toxic behaviors, and seem to have bigger plans that will probably be relevant later on.

The characters that are only focused on for an episode or two (like Matt and the troublemaker kids) all have very worked out personalities and even short arcs.

And heck, even characters like Boscha, who is extremely minor and seems like a very one-dimensional bully for the most part, get their moments that hint at there being more to them. We know Boscha has a clingy mom, that apparently has a rivalry with Odalia and works with Amity’s parents. The scene at the beginning of Wing It Like Witches tells us a lot about her general mindset and how she’s embraced that winning at whatever cost is the only thing that matters.

This leaves us with: 3-4 main characters

3 friends with fleshed out stories

Lilith, who is probably the most relevant aside from the main cast

Belos, the main antagonist, and the Golden Guard, currently starting to become a lot more relevant

A whole handful of minor reoccurring characters that have the potential to become bigger characters at any point in time

A handful of minor reoccurring characters that mainly seem to be there to further the story, but still get to have distinctive personalities and motivations (looking p.e. at the troublemaker kids)

That is AT LEAST 9 pretty major, relevant characters whose stories have to be tackled in the same show, in addition to the people that joined in season two and a huge supporting cast of well-developed characters that clearly also have stories of their own, even if not all of them will get told.

On top of that, the Owl House lives from exploring different relationships and different storylines. There’s the overarching story of how flawed the system is that will likely end with them overthrowing Belos, but there’s so much more.

Eda and the curse. Eda becoming a better mentor for Luz. Eda coming to terms with the loss of her magic.

Luz learning to cast magic with glyphs. Making friends for the first time. Slowly falling in love with Amity. Fighting to be able to learn whatever kind of magic she wants to. Learning that she’s not a burden to people. Struggling with her relationship with her mom, and trying to restore the portal so she can get back to her. Figuring out her future and what she really wants.

Lilith trying to cure Eda, and now in season two coming to terms with the loss of her magic and fixing her relationship with her sister. Lilith learning to ask for help.

Willow switching tracks. Willow growing more confident.

Amity becoming a better person, fixing her relationship with Willow, standing up to her parents, falling in love with Luz. Starting to fix her relationship with her siblings.

King finding out where he came from.

Hints at Gus struggling with decision making and stressing himself out less. Gus learning to be more selfless. Struggling with his magic track and being the youngest in his grade.

The newly introduced plot point with the Golden Guard. The plot point about the rebellion that will get introduced next episode.

The mystery with the letters.

And I’m like 90% sure I’ve forgotten something.

That is… a lot of different plots and relationships that are in some way important to the story.

In comparison, as stated, the last show I wrote for focused mostly on the same five characters and their relationships with each other, and one overarching plotline aside from some minor interpersonal relationships with two people’s family members that weren’t even introduced for several seasons. The first season fully focused on establishing the bond within this found family with exactly 1 important reoccurring character, an antagonist that had little personality and got a total of one line of backstory before he died.

If you have 90% of a season to develop 5 characters who live together, that’s a lot easier to do than developing twice the amount of important characters + introducing reoccurring characters season one of The Owl House has—the majority of which have separate lives and do not live together and thus can’t be focused on at the same time.

I’ve seen a bunch of people complain recently that the pacing of The Owl House is off, that the writing is bad, that the show is rushed, etc. etc.

And I get those complains. Believe me, as a viewer and also as an author that takes a lot of time to develop each character and their issues individually, I 100% get it.

But as an author that’s currently learning how hard it is to tackle a cast of the size that The Owl House has, I’ve also come to a whole different understanding from the perspective of the writers on the show.

For context, Locked Out focuses on a couple of serious themes, in the same way that the show does. It has 4 main plotlines: Amity Camila and Luz, Edric and Emira, Eda and Lilith, Willow and the Grudgby Squad (as well as a Gus arc that ties into the last one while also being its own thing, we’re getting to that part). So far, it prominently features: Luz, Amity, Camila, Eda, Emira, Edric, Willow and Gus, and to a lesser extent King, Lilith and Boscha, Skara and Amelia in relation to the separate plots.

That’s eight main characters across five different households. And then there’s the reoccurring characters that will have a larger role later on that I’ve not even had the opportunity to bring into the story yet/feature in a more prominent way. The cast is still growing.

And heck, I have all the time in the world to write this thing, because I don’t have an episode limit, or a deadline, or a limited amount of money to produce it.

For Locked Out, it took me 120k to get through a single week of plot at a very high level of character development, with about as many important characters as TOH has in season 1, and with an equally high number of reoccurring characters, some minor, some major. I think you can compare it to the show pretty well. I’d say, if I were to split Locked Out into episodes, I’d set one episode at about 10k. That would be 12 episodes. 12 episodes to get through a single week. Heck, even if I said 20k words were to be one episode, which I’m pretty sure is too much realistically, that would still be 6 episodes for one week.

And TOH covers more than three months.

That would be at least 72 total episodes to get through the three months of summer camp. And we’re currently progressing past that point.

72 episodes.

Let that sit for a while o.o

Everything that’s happened in season one (which as we know now was about 2 months) would have happened in 48 episodes rather than 19. Pacing-wise, everything would happen at less than 0.5x the speed. The first four episodes of season two would’ve been 24 episodes, assuming we hadn’t skipped a week and a half and had instead shown the immediate aftermath of the petrification ceremony, too.

And I’d love if we could have that, and if we could actually develop the characters and their relationships that thoroughly.

But the sad fact is that shows like The Owl House do not get the amount of episodes that would be required to develop every single aspect of the show to its fullest potential. Disney rarely greenlits shows of 150 episodes anymore. They used to, once, (Phineas&Ferb for example had 130+ episodes—you could tell one hell of a story in that many episodes), but that’s not a thing anymore. And the writers know that going into a show. They know the chances their story will be told in that way are very low.

And thus, the writers, especially ones working with large casts, have to make a choice: cut characters they love, and plots that are important to them, because they know they won’t get the amount of episodes required to do everything perfectly, OR include most of what they want to do, but at the cost of the pacing being off and everything seemingly happening too fast.

The Owl House crew went with the second option. The biggest issue the show has isn’t bad writing. The show’s biggest issue is that its cast and the story the crew members want to tell are too big for the amount of episodes they’ve been given (especially now that Disney decided to cut season 3 down into just three 44 minute specials).

And that’s on Disney, and Disney alone.

The crew is making the most of the amount of episodes they have, and unfortunately the lack of time forces them to rush things, and to sometimes sideline characters to focus on others.

Lilith got a bunch of screen time in the first four episodes. I’m sad to see her go, but she’s basically guaranteed to be back by season 2B. And there’s other people that have gotten way less focus than her so far. We‘ve seen basically nothing of Willow and Gus for the first few episodes, and I’m super happy Gus finally got some focus! We haven’t been inside Hexside all season except to see Luz expelled! And episode seven is even going to introduce a new character. Sometimes there’s parts of the story that certain characters don’t have a place in. And it sucks if they’re characters you like. But Lilith has to go for a bit so other characters can get the same amount of spotlight she did. At the end of the day, Lilith is not part of the main cast. She’s a very important reoccurring character, yes, but so are Amity, Willow and Gus. The main characters are Eda, Luz and King, and they’re the only ones that will always be around. And heck, even Eda got sidelined for a bit in the last two episodes, because we needed to focus on other characters. If not even the main characters are always around because we need some spotlight time for other characters, you can’t expect any more minor reoccurring cast member to be.

God, I wish they’d be given more time and more episodes to bring every part of the plot to its full potential, but they don’t have those, so they sometimes have to take shortcuts that unfortunately cheapen the story here and there. It’s the only way they can hope to tell their story to the end at all. And that makes me hella sad because it’s so obvious that they have an incredible story to tell, and that there’s so much more to so many of the characters we just don’t have the time to focus on.

The thing is: I liked the episode with Gwendolyn. It sends an important message that will hopefully get some parents who watch with their children thinking, and I’ve seen a couple of people talk about how close to home it hit for them. I have also seen a couple of people complain about that being too fast—and also just in general about things in the show getting sorted out too fast. And I get it. At least with this particular episode, I 100% get it.

(I’ve also seen some people complain that “Amity stood up to her parents too fast in Escaping Expulsion”, but I vehemently disagree with that. We’ve been building towards that moment since season one, with her doing more and more things that were technically defying her parents. I don’t see how this was rushed.)

Just… please don’t blame the writers. Dana even said that Keeping Up A-Fearances is one of the episodes that hit very close to home for her in the recent stream iirc? So I highly doubt this was rushed on purpose, or because the whole thing is “bad writing” when the entire writing quality of the show says otherwise.

A lot of shows in general have the issue that they have to be written season by season rather than as a full story these days, because there’s always a chance that they won’t get a next season. How large scale the story they want to tell actually is doesn’t matter if there’s a solid chance they won’t get to do any of it.

From a viewer perspective, I get being frustrated at the pacing being off. But from a writer perspective, the chances are very high that this is a choice they had to make, rather than one they wanted to make. And I don’t think you can truly see this if you’ve never worked with a fleshed out cast that large—Locked Out was really eye-opening for me in that regard.

This isn’t simply a case of bad writing/bad pacing by choice. It’s forced. They’re forced to rush through their plots because otherwise they won’t get the chance to tell certain parts of the story at all. And the saddest thing about this is really that those 72+ episodes to flesh out these plot points further wouldn’t have been an impossible thing to get, at a time.

Go for Disney’s head. Yell at the industry for being what it is today, for constantly axing shows before even giving them a real chance. But this isn’t on the crew.

[shepherds-of-haven]

Sorry if you've answered this before, but what are the hardest and easiest characters in ShOH to write?

Hi there, thanks for your question!! I'm pretty sure I have answered this before, but the Tumblr search function is a nightmare, so I'm happy to give my answer now! :D

Easiest characters to write: For anyone who doesn't know, ShoH originally started out as a series of novels beginning formally around the time I was 10-12, so the characters who were part of the "main squad" in the novels are always the easiest characters for me to write today. Aside from the novel protagonist, Arainia, Blade is my oldest character, so he's very easy for me to write, along with Trouble, Chase, and Riel--the most prominent and "oldest" (longest-existing) characters in the novels. Red and Halek do become a part of the team later in the series, but have more minor roles than the "original" core group; but Red also attended school with the protagonist, so he features heavily in the series even before they become Shepherds, and is therefore pretty familiar for me (though not as familiar as the characters who had novel-length or central POVs, like the other five). So, in short, it's Blade, Trouble, Chase, Riel, followed closely by Red! Before their respective chapters/short stories, I struggled a lot with Lavinet and Briony, but now that I've spent some time writing them, they flow pretty seamlessly as well!

Hardest characters to write: I tend to have a more difficult time with the characters with more "chill" personalities, who tend to be more content with observing or remaining in the background rather than occupying the spotlight. I think it's just easier (for me) to write characters with really bold or obvious personality traits: like Riel's neuroticism and Trouble's brashness or Lavinet's ojou-sama-ness makes it easy for me to imagine exactly how they'd act in a consistent and vivid manner, or exactly how they'd jump into an ongoing conversation. For characters who are significantly quieter or calmer, it's harder for me to write them in a way that is consistent with their personality but doesn't allow them to be overshadowed or forgotten in the presence of larger figures like a Chase or a Briony. I want them to be realistic and "themselves," but I don't want them to come off as boring or not as fun to spend time with in comparison to the others. It's not even really an extravert/introvert thing, because Blade and Riel are quite introverted, but they still have very strong personalities, whereas characters like Halek and Tallys are more mellow and go with the flow with whatever's going on around them. I don't have trouble writing them when something's going on, like a story mission or a group conversation, but I struggle more with their day off scenes and one-on-one interactions. Part of it is just the calmer attitude and the fact that they're naturally not very talkative or reactive (Blade doesn't talk a lot but you learn to read his body language, whereas Halek and especially Tallys are a bit harder to scan); and part of it is just that they're not as familiar to me as the "older" characters, and I have to spend more time with them to unearth their "stronger" or more defining personality traits! (And their particular quirks, mannerisms, and etc., whereas I already know the others' like the back of my hand!) In the novels, Tallys was a minor character on another squad and was usually only seen while in the presence of her other teammates, and Halek was a later addition to the main squad, but most of his scenes were defined by his relationships to other people (his ongoing romance with Wintry, for example) and he also didn't have the backstory he has in the game, so I have to spend more time discovering his "current" personality and psychology. And it's hard for me to get in the head of someone who's lived for two hundred years, but I know that the more I write scenes with her, the more I'll crack it!

The other difficult character for me to write right now is Ayla! While she has pretty much the same personality as she did in the novels, I think I struggle a lot with staying true to her initial personality and character and being aware of her appeal as an RO, which is something I didn't have to worry about in the books. Realistically, Ayla comes off as a bit brash, distrustful, hot-tempered, blunt, and assertive bordering on aggressive, even though she has a good heart and cares about her friends intensely, and that makes perfect sense (to me) based on the backstory and personality that I've given her. I'm trying to explore her character in a way that feels accurate (I don't want to make her secretly soft or cute if that's not how I feel she really is) and does service to what she's been through, but I also worry about her being likable and appealing. I tell myself that, like, Morrigan from Dragon Age is super popular even though she has a prickly personality just like Ayla's, but I keep overthinking 'oh, is that too mean?' when Ayla naturally says something... so it's like I'm stopping up my own natural flow when it comes to her character! It's like having someone who keeps blurting things out during a conversation and having to worry about how they're being perceived, rather than just enjoying the flow of the conversation itself... Unlike Halek or Tallys--who I feel like I have to figure out or spend more time with to know what they'd say--I know what Ayla would say, but I way overthink it or spend more time tweaking it than I do with other characters!

Anyway, this is all stuff I'm working through, just like every other writer, and it's something I'm looking forward to tackling as I spend more time with the characters I'm not as familiar with! Thanks for your great question, and I hope my answer wasn't too long or rambling, lol!

[immaturityofthomasastruc]

The Chloe-Saga

Regarding the whole Chloe-situation: I don’t get it. Just what exactly makes Astruc not only hate a character of his creation to this extent but also makes him not stop giving her more and more prominence in the actual show? Like, in S1 she was the quintessential high school bully. Hates the main character, has the same love interest, causes a lot of “problems/villain of the week”. And guess what? That’s perfectly fine as an archetype. She fulfilled her purpose and it was fun whenever she got put down a notch. That some fans latched onto her and her being redeemed? That’s what a fandom does. It takes characters and gives them a new spin – that does not mean they like what a character in canon does, it means they want to explore those characters outside their bubble. With the identity-shenanigans going on, there even was a pre-build reason for why Chloe might question herself. In S2 we then got the full package of explanations for why Chloe’s Chloe. And while some of them were a bit much and Chloe still did a lot of bad things that might even exceed the “justifications”, Chloe became more than an archetype and more like a character with a clearer background and needs and wishes. What did Astruc expect? Even when we don’t buy her background AND think she went far beyond moral boundaries, there still is a lot more to latch onto. And in S3 and in S4 she got more focus and excuses. Fought of an Akuma. Was explicitly targeted by the big bad and more than once hurt by her idol. Got more family drama and focus on how her family affects people. If we are truly meant to hate Chloe and see not one bit of goodness (which Astruc tells us too) just why are we getting all that focus and excuses? As a one-dimensional schoolyard bully it would have been a lot easier to simply hate her. But that role is apparently Lila’s turf now… The way I see her character and development: One of her traits from the very beginning was how much she liked Ladybug and how much it hurt her whenever LB rejected or renounced her in a way she could not wave aside. She even literally dressed up as Ladybug! In S2 when her mother was introduced, what was one of the first things Chloe did? She sat besides her and mimicked every single movement. For me these were the defining moments of Chloe’s potential to be good. A girl who just really craves the attention of powerful female role models that she can model herself after. A girl who is way more insecure than her bratty face lets on. A girl who has not yet really found herself. Audrey’s entire character essentially is a grown-up Chloe. Petty and nasty and kicking down at every opportunity. Seeing how Chloe reacted to her, mimicked her, and just wanted to be recognized by her, I see most of Chloe’s character essentially as her modelling herself after her. Which is not helped by her father essentially being a rubberstamp with authority, Sabrina being an extended arm, and the butler…being a butler. Ladybug was the counter-weight. It was obvious Chloe cared about her and her opinion of her. She was still flawed and at times outright cruel but there was a hint of progress. Be it her later appearances as Queen Bee where she was either willing to listen (Maledictator) or act as part of the team (Heroe’s Day) or the entire “rejected an Akuma”-saga complete with shielding Sabrina without anything to gain from it. For me the most hurtful moment was when Marinette in her endless goodness reconciled mother and daughter. Because ultimately that was part of what made Chloe continue to model herself after Audrey and what made her stop questioning if Audrey truly is a woman to be emulated. Double hurtful because with Ladybug off her pedestal she was back as the sole role model and because this is yet another thing that can be construed as ultimately being Marinette’s fault (which I don’t believe in and absolutely hate!). We had all these things. Neglectful mother she wanted to emulate in the hopes to be recognized. Secondary role model that cast her out for reasons pertaining to her sins of the past and even before often rejected her for reasons Chloe couldn’t know about. A lot of enablers who either can’t or won’t tell her ‘no’ or 'stop that’ [and we know Chloe at least listens when the few people she cares about tell her]. This is not a condemnation story, that is a tragedy! Which is another thing I am weirded out about. How can Chloe be an irredeemable demon who has not a semblance of goodness in her and yet we are expected to feel stabbed in the heart by the S3-finale? Either she had the potential to be good and it was a tragedy it was not meant to be, or she is an obvious devil who nobody should feel for or with. We can’t have both! Should I feel betrayed or should I feel like that was just Chloe upping her Chloeness?

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

According to what Astruc said, we were all supposed to feel betrayed by the Season 3 finale.

Chloe’s relationship with her mother is a real missed opportunity, as she was set up as a completely despicable person everyone hates, and of course, she reconciles with her while the writers never acknowledge the abuse. Seriously, Astruc doesn’t think Chloe being emotionally neglected by her mother for years to the point where she can’t even get her name right and developing a slight inferiority complex as a result counts as abuse.

THIS IS WHAT THOMAS ASTRUC ACTUALLY BELIEVES

Like you said, there have been plenty of plenty of irredeemable villains the audience still felt bad for when they were defeated because of how tragic their stories were.

Tai Lung from the original Kung Fu Panda is a good example. He was trained by Master Shifu, someone he saw as a father, and his skills grew, so did his desire for power. He saw not being granted the title of the Dragon Warrior as if he was denied something that was rightfully his. There’s also the fact that his desire to become the Dragon Warrior stemmed from his desire to make his father proud of him by achieving the greatest honor in Kung Fu.

Tai Lung: All I ever did, I did to make you PROUD! Tell me how proud you are, Shifu! Tell me! TELL ME! 

Shifu: (quietly) I have always been proud of you. From the first moment, I've been... proud of you. And it was my pride that blinded me. I loved you too much to see what you were becoming... what I was turning you into. I'm s... I'm sorry. 

Tai Lung: (hesitates for a moment before grabbing the injured Shifu) I don’t want your apology. I want my scroll!

Even though he stops for a second, Tai Lung still wants his power, ultimately shooting down the last chance he had at reconciling with his father. Both him and Shifu had problems that led to Tai Lung’s descent into villainy, but while one recognized his part, the other simply couldn’t comprehend he did anything wrong in the first place. THAT is how you do a tragic villain, not what we got with Chloe.

If Astruc wanted Chloe to be an irredeemable monster, he needed to show her meaner moments weren’t something to laugh at (something the show Kevin Can F**k Himself is doing a great job at in regards to the titular character by deconstructing sitcom cliches), and have the audience take her seriously as a threat, not a joke villain like in “Queen Banana”. If Chloe actually was a “deep character” like what Astruc obviously planned from the start, she should have been more than comic relief after betraying Ladybug.