#Salt Club

[fleshmonger]

Rotating Sandwich Mood Board

Rotating Sandwich Mood Board

[sophieabigail2021]

[zhoras-bitch]

I really hate how smug Malek is. Bro, you are not the genius master manipulator that you think you are, I am only trusting you because the story forced me too 😭

[yenleak]

A. Remy and her fanbase are the most problematic thing that happened in RC fandom

Not only she is rude to people being realistic/critical about her writing, but also clearly xenophobic and arrogant. I will never forgive her for the fact that she allows artists to draw people of color like this... Why making stories only about them – and their religion... – at all if she can't do any real research and figure out what she should be writing about?

Im also annoyed by the fact that SOTCN has no plot and too many holes in it. How does Livius know about Evthys' presence in that dream, if the dream did not belong to him, but to his ex? And what is generally known about the disease and why don't we hear anything about it? Why buy information about it to find out only the general features that we already heard about in previous chapters?.. It seems like the author herself just kind of threw the whole arc of disease to concentrate on Evthys' runaway.

KFS is weird, also. i am very concerned about the way Remy portrays the atmosphere in the story. The dynamics of relationship between Indians and British are so unclear? At one point they are very normal about presence of the whites, and Devi is so okay with marrying Ian even though they allegedly making plans and so on. I just mean that she has no thoughts other than couple of phrases in the beginning and we see very little of real relationships and historical accurate circumstances. And I think that you should be responsible for portrayal of the whole CULTURE and the least you can do is to make it less fetishized and inaccurate.

The way Remy is fully aware of what shes doing but purposefully ignores the amount of complaints our fandom has. She listens to her russian-speaking followers who do nothing but blindly admire her work without thinking about the representation she gives. And when someone point out on her mistakes she gets mad , subtly aggressive. If you know russian you can just take a look on her telegram channel and replies shes gives. Its arrogant and kind of disrespectful because the rejection of your own mistakes and the eternal justification and blame on others shows your true attitude towards your readers.

My main complaint is only about how illiterate she writes, how much she takes on herself and how she doesn't give a fuck about other cultures. And the fact that so many people love her and then misunderstand POC makes it so much worse

[pigeonpalacade]

Ready to be the most insufferable bitch in the fight club rescreening

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

I wouldn't really agree that boys are just arm candy in magical girl shows and only there to look cute. Yeah, sure the girls' friendships are the focus, but the boys are usually very much involved in the plot and most shows do explore their feelings about the odd things that happen due to magical shenanigans even if they aren't in the know (It's why ML baffles me even more with how they screwed up Adren's arc when he's the deuteragonist, when all these boys are supporting cast and get well rounded arcs)

I'm not much of a winx fan, but the specialists were very much not arm candy. Did the girls talk about them being cute? Yes, it's what teenage girls do. Did the narrative suggest they were good looking? Yes, but that's standard for most love interests in any genre. But we still got scenes with them talking amongst themselves about how they themselves feel and they got a fair share of badass fight scenes even if they wield no magic. A large amount of episodes actually included the boys and girls working as a team solving a mystery or fighting a villain. The girls might deal the finishing blow but the boys were still integral to the plot.

I hope this doesn't come across as hate, it definitely wasn't my intention. I'm just a bit too passionate about the magical girl genre.

I do think you have a good point with ML having a problem choosing a genre or blending two genres successfully.

For the CCS fans, I will add though that Cardcaptor Sakura had both Tomoyo and Syaoran serve as sources of motivation for Sakura. And both Sakura and Syaoran collecting cards even if Sakura is the only one who could seal them and yet never made you question whether Syaoran was even necessary for the job the way ml does with Chat.

I wasn't trying to say that boys have no part to play in magical girl team shows or that they're always treated as having no lives beyond the girls, that's why I mentioned that the Winx Club boys - aka, the Specialists - have their own (mostly off screen) lives and occasionally show up help the girls:

the boys are usually off doing their own thing and only occasionally show up for a date or to give the girls a ride on their cool bikes or magical spaceship

Even then, this is certainly a simplification of the roles that they play in the story, but I kind of had to simplify their roles down to their base components for the original post's discussion as I was talking in broad strokes of how these stories are written.

In terms of those broad strokes, the Specialists are absolutely only there for shipping fodder. That's why each one is assigned to a girl from the start and why their main role in the narrative is supporting their assigned love interest or causing relationship-based drama for their assigned love interest. If it weren't for shipping, then the Specialists would not exist.

While the Specialists do have fleshed out characters and may even effect the plot, the execution of those elements is designed around the girls. A really obvious example of this is the character Timmy, who has character development as the boy's tech guy. Why is he into technology? Because he's the designated love interest for the fairy of Technology and we have to show why they're a good match. Along similar lines, the boys don't really get plots that are removed from the girls because this is the girl's show. Every episode features one or more of the Winx, but the boys are optional and often don't appear.

This is because, narratively speaking, the boys are just love interests and that brings us back to Miraculous' big problem. You can't have a show where Adrien is written like a Specialist while also being part of the Winx Club and where Alya is written like she's part of the Winx Club while technically being more of a Specialist in terms of power set and actual narrative role.

I'm was thinking back to my memories of various Winx Club plots to find one that really highlighted what I mean here and I remembered that one of the big dramas in season one was the reveal that Bloom's love interest - Sky - was in an arranged marriage and had just never told her. As it turns out, that's a great example of what I'm talking about re Adrien!

Is that plot line technically based around Sky and letting his life effect the plot? Sure, but the fallout of that reveal revolves around Bloom, not Sky. The story doesn't really care how Sky's feeling as the conflict progresses. Instead, it focuses on how it affects Bloom and her friends because of course it does! She's the main character. It would be really weird if that plot suddenly focused on her side character love interest and his friends during one of her darkest hours/biggest moments.

Think of that and then consider how the ending of season five is written. Notice any similarities? Sure, this is Adrien's family drama, but because he's just a Specialist, the focus isn't on him. It's on Winx Club member Marinette and Adrien only shows up at the end for a kiss. That is the problem. That is what I'm talking about when I say that Miraculous will randomly write him as if we're watching a magical girl team show where Adrien is just the love interest.

In fact, let's really dig into this example because it's a good one.

You can have a look at the transcript for the finale episode of Miraculous season five here and see for yourself that Adrien doesn't even show up on screen until the final scenes when the big drama is over. The Winx Club wiki also has episode transcripts, so I took a look to see what happened in Winx land during the arranged marriage reveal plot (I love that this is a thing. It's so useful for fact checking myself!) This is the script for the episode after Bloom learns the truth. Sky does not appear even though his lies and family drama are the fuel for this episode's events, which are a major part of the season's arc. Note how perfectly that matches Adrien's writing?

Similarly, Sky's dialogue in the reveal episode is all about Bloom. He's worried about her learning the truth and thinking less of him. To match that, here's Adrien's only real dialogue in the penultimate episode of season five (full transcript):

Adrien:(Covers his ears.) I cannot transform... (Looks at his ring and tries taking it off.) Plagg: What are you doing?! Adrien: I'm not in my right mind. I'm too angry — at myself for falling short of Marinette's love, at my father for sending me here in London, at this stupid app and these rings that use my image... it makes me sick! This nightmare is giving me the horrible feeling that, if I transform, I'll get akumatized and destroy everything with my Cataclysm — Marinette, Ladybug... (Takes off the ring and hands it to Plagg.)

Switching back to Winx. After Bloom learns the truth about Sky, bad things happen because she's depressed. This results in her and the Winx going off on a journey to learn the truth of who Bloom is. After the girls share this big plot moment and Bloom gets her mojo back, the boys show up to be their ride home and to give Bloom her romance moment where Sky wins her back by declaring that he broke off the arranged married because he loves her.

Sky notably doesn't get an arc about choosing between his arranged marriage and his true love. We don't even know that the marriage is broken off until he tells Bloom because that was never really a conflict as far as the narrative was concerned. Of course he's going to pick Bloom! He's her designated side character love interest! He only exists to be with her. We don't need to treat this as a serious thing for him. The arranged marriage plot was never about him anyway. It was about giving Bloom a reason to have a darkest hour moment that moves the plot forward. Similarly, Sky calling off the marriage is nowhere near as important as him telling Bloom that he's called off the marriage to be with her in a grand romantic gesture.

This perfectly mirrors Miraculous' season five ending where Adrien doesn't appear until after Marinette is done fighting her big girl power fight against his father. As far as the writing is concerned, that fight isn't about him. His connection to the villain only really matters in terms of how it affects Marinette's actions during the final battle. Then, when the battle is over, Adrien shows up to give Marinette her big romance moment because, while the plot may be driven by Adrien's family, he is not a Winx club member. He's just a Specialist. Or, in the words of the head writer:

[image text: She's Barbie, he's Ken. You don't like it. I get it. It won't change. Anything else?] (The full, even more damning context of this tweet can be found here.)

What else can I say other than, "I rest my case."

Oh, and also that I didn't take this as an attack. I just thought it was a good opportunity to really dig into the nuances of this and what I was talking about in that original post as I never know how obvious this stuff is if you don't closely study story telling. As this case study hopefully shows, if a show is about a group of girl friends using the power of friendship, then their love interests may have important roles, but the boys are never going to be more important than the girls and most of the boy's screen time will be focused on romance and how their existence effects the girls because it's ultimately the girls' world. Without them, the show wouldn't exist. Without the boys? Well, then we just wouldn't have a romance plot.

[blue-eli]

For the last day of pride month: sea salt family!

[secret-tester]

Uhhhh.... Hi?

Practice

[toothbrushfingers]

i’m sorry but i hate her more than i can put into words

her design is pretty yes, but it just doesn’t fit into the httyd universe. NOTHING about her does. Like, first off she’s just a cat. And not in the same way toothless is. She MEOWS.

Her design is so overly feminized. It’s literally this meme

you cannot convince me otherwise.

i bet in 2015 you could’ve googled “girl nightfury” and found something better than that

AND there is no reason toothless would fall for her. First of all, they aren’t the same species. They’re subspecies. Like lions and tigers. And yes, lions and tigers can mate, but they don’t naturally and really shouldn’t. They’re offspring often has a hard time surviving outside of captivity. Toothless also would not abandon Hiccup, especially not for some random ass dragon that literally tried to blast his skinny butt into oblivion.

ok enough venting, here’s my honest opinion: if they really wanted a female fury, they should’ve just made her a nightfury. cut the lightfury bullshit. if they wanted her to stand out, make her albino instead of a subspecies. That’s all they had to do. But nope 😔. Dreamworks wanted money and a quick way to end the series. And that’s what they got.

[quintingell]

The snow-white ground was cracked like dried lips and crunched under my feet. I could smell the salt. I kept trying to think of what it looked like, but my brain could only find highly figurative similes. It looks like driving alone at night feels. It looks like everything you're scared to say out loud. It looks like the moment the water retreats from the shore just before a wave rolls in.

~John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed

[brown-little-robin]

zombie au intro post time!!

So Mob was a zombie for a hot minute. (a few months). Ritsu gets Mob all the way to Salt Township, a community in the process of perfecting a zombie cure. Salt doesn't cure every zombie in the world—they do as much as they can but it's a question of limited time and resources. Besides, cured zombies need taken care of after the fact, too. But perhaps the single most important value the community collectively holds is protecting their kids, and Ritsu and Mob are from here, originally, back before their parents moved them away from the epicenter of the zombie apocalypse. So of course they're eager to cure Mob. The adults in charge of the curing process are very impressed with Mob's health and lifespan, which was Ritsu's doing, but they warn Ritsu that the cure doesn't always work 100% and it's a long process, and Mob's having lived for so long with zombie disease will make his reaction to the cure unpredictable.

Ritsu swings between overprotective paranoia and brief bouts of simple shell-shocked relief to be back in a human community with adults to take care of things. He allows them to give Shigeo the cure (regularly, it requires innumerable hospital visits)—provided Ritsu gets to monitor his recovery, provided Ritsu gets final say on whether to continue with it or not, provided Ritsu gets a house to himself to take care of Shige in. Given that Ritsu is extremely mentally unwell but has a strong sense of responsibility that will hopefully keep him stable as long as his brother relies on him, Salt Township authorities agree to his demands. There aren't really enough adults to go around, after all. So Ritsu and Shigeo live alone.

Mob recovers, slowly, painfully, but he recovers. The main thing Ritsu was hoping for was that Shige would get his clarity back, and he does, mostly! Shigeo remembers things, slowly putting his neural connections back into place. He grieves his parents very quietly. After about a month, he starts speaking again.

(The first thing he says is daijoubu. I'm fine.)

(Ritsu finds his gaze flinching away from his brother's sharpening red eyes sometimes, at first, overwhelmed by Shigeo's new presence. There's a hot tight ball of pain in Ritsu's chest and he doesn't understand why he's reacting like this while Shigeo is objectively getting better. Ritsu is too terrified to admit it out loud to anyone, but he misses his brother as a zombie. the simplicity of it, he thinks, sickened by himself; he misses the simplicity. but anyway.)

Mob's still slower than he used to be. It takes him a while to think things over. He reacts slowly to things. It takes patience to hold a conversation with Mob. Also, his strength doesn't seem to be fading with the cure; if anything, he seems to be getting stronger as the cure works its way through his system, purging the milky, vague fog it wove through his brain and organs. Mob is left with raw strength he doesn't remember how to control, and the more aware he becomes, the closer to the surface of his mind he rises, the more he grows to fear his new body. the potential he has to hurt someone—the way his numb fingers feel metal door handles as soft, malleable, the way he absentmindedly bites through the rims of glasses—he tries to hide it as much as possible.

Mob's still got zombie-style insomnia, by the time he's declared officially human again. He refuses to show his strength, even when the doctors plead with him, so no one knows exactly how strong he is. He's probably still inhumanly resilient to injuries, but that doesn't get tested. His pain sense is still dangerously dull, although he gets flashes of agonizing sensitivity every so often—is the cause of his numbness psychological or physical? does the distinction even matter?

Mob was docile as a zombie, and he's docile while he's being cured. The remembering process takes a lot out of him. And some of the things he remembers—

flashes of light. uncomfortably loud popping sounds. salty taste, crunchy. salty taste, wet. little brother's eyes. walking. walking. flowers. flashing lights. little brother screaming. vague alarm. rain. being pulled, refusing to move. plants. fluffy animal moving in front of him. little brother's voice singing. little brother's head on his shoulder. little brother holding his hand.

Some of the things he remembers are—

little brother screaming. himself growling.

something between his teeth. hunger.

Some of the things he remembers, he forces himself to un-remember. Some of the emotions he feels about it, he forces himself to un-feel. Keeping Shigeo safe cost Ritsu too much. He can't make his little brother take care of him again. He has to get better faster so he can be a good big brother again.

Daijoubu. Mob is fine.

[coollizzylou]

Fellow SotO lovers, please please interact I want to discuss the themes and motifs in a low sodium environment.

[zhoras-bitch]

I honestly really wanted to enjoy Chasing You 2, and at first it even seemed like I might. Season 1 toned down on all the things I disliked about the original and about Ursa's writing in general. Which are, of course, inappropriate sex jokes and situations, (internalised) misogyny and tired gender stereotypes (in the form of 'Uwu I'm a girl, I don't know how to do anything!'). I even enjoyed Alexander, who I didn't like at all in CY1--he was less of a dick, and more of a fun and likeable dick. Eva and Ellia got more screen time, character development and plot relevance. And as a sapphic, I thought Rachel and Eva routes were going pretty great.

Even the main character got a new motivation--to become a detective--and more agency. The time period, the mystery, the mix of natural with supernatural, Sherlock Holmes references--it was all coming together to make a neat little detective story with a lot of fun comedic moments.

And then this update came, and I just. I feel like I should not be disappointed, because this is just good old Ursa, but I really am. What the fuck was that scene with Sam. What the fuck was that scene with Alexander. What the fuck was that scene with Ezra. What the fuck was that scene with the twins. What. The. Fuck.

[captainofthetidesbreath]

I've been thinking about why Ginsberg was asked to kidnap Milton Fleit Sr. specifically, and I think, to put it the way @utilitycaster put it to me back in February, that the plan is Fight Club.

If you're unfamiliar with Fight Club, the film adaptation: the third act revolves around a plan to wipe debt records by blowing up the headquarters of various credit card companies and of a credit reporting agency, setting everyone back to zero.

The Breach doesn't need as many explosives. The Trust keeps their records of every account in the one place (per 1.15): the Central Vault, the precise location of which within the geography of the Highest Light has been pointed out at every opportunity this season.

There isn't a whole lot that kidnapping Fleit offers to the Breach other than vacating his office temporarily (dubious, unless they want to replace him with their own person) or to get information about how the Bank of Valor works as an institution and how the Vault is laid out (also shaky, but potentially possible). Kozma claims (in 3.07): "The Breach isn't just out there. It's in here: inside the Trust, inside the Company, inside this city." The fact that the Company is mentioned* but not the Bank makes me wonder if they don't actually have a meaningfully significant enough foothold inside the Bank. Thus, they needed a way to get inside of it, understand it, or both.

* Tangent, since the Company is specifically mentioned, there must be someone we know there who is with the Breach. It's gotta be Gretel; we have only two named current members of the Company, and the other one is Spahr. It has to be Gretel just by process of elimination. This is not actually relevant to this point but—

That also leads me to wonder if this is why there's this sense of hovering over Phineas early on. (Hieronymous is in the Breach, Kozma already knew a lot about Phineas, so many seem to be keeping tabs on him, etc.) I wonder if it's like... after the Fleit plot failed, the Breach needed someone who had or could acquire security clearance to move freely through the Vault, a familiarity of off-limits areas, or both. As the new Prime Adsecla, and an apparently contentious pick for it (as suggested in appendices for 1.06), Phineas both holds a valuable position and is potentially ideologically vulnerable, making him a prime [ba dum tsh] candidate to target for a flip attempt. So, perhaps they've been working on Phineas since the Fleit plot failed. But, that's also a bit of a tangent.

Point is here: they seem to have needed Fleit for something. Kozma had ideas for what to do with Phineas, and whatever they needed Fleit for must be a gap in their logistics, but there is not a whole lot that Fleit and Phineas have in common, other than familiarity with various high-security spaces. So, I do wonder if the thing they needed was Vault access, because the specific plan is to blow up the TRW building Vault and zero out the entire debt record.

[doranbasu]

sir I need YOU on a platter

[solariaswitch]

Selina would have made more sense as Roxy's earth friend rather than Bloom's earth friend but of course they didn't do that