#That goes really badly

[taliesin-the-bored]

Crop-Eared Dog Quotes No. 2: Lanny beat up over 7,000 knights and Arthur has the healthiest priorities (not)

Like any decent gatecrashing antagonist, the Knight of the Lantern demands battle, which shouldn’t be a problem, because Arthur is (inexplicably) the King of the World and

not more were the plants through the floor of the world, or joints in a human body, or days in the year, than the active warriors and very valiant knights in the household of that powerful king: that is to say, there were twelve knights of valour, and twelve knights of activity, and twelve knights of the Round Table, and twelve knights of counsel, and two hundred and two-score knights of the Great Table, and seven thousand knights of the household…

but…this happens:

{T}he Knight of the Lantern bound them all save only Galahad de Cordibus, who was a young, beardless boy, on that spot. And he goes straight back by the same way, after leaving the king and his people tightly bound in that fashion, and he pours a dark mist of druidry behind him, and they were thus till the setting of the noonday cloud, and to the rising of the sun on the morrow. Then the king spoke to the household, and thus he said:

"A pity is this thing which has happened to us," said he, "for were the ladies and women of the Fort of the Red Hall to know of our being like this, they would make the mischief of a mock and jest of us, and publish our despite and our weakness over the whole world, and to doomsday and the world's end would never again be beside us…"

One knight has just beat up all of his knights, even though there are well over seven thousand of them, and Arthur’s big concern is that the ladies of the court will laugh at them.

[hrokkall]

not a ship & late request sorryyy but could i shoot my shot n request some valentines p03 for the p03 likers 👉👈

I'll do you one better. Here's a set of scrybe valentines for all your scrybe valentine needs. Perfect for loved* ones. Or hated ones.

*I'm not liable if you, like the scrybes, have to file divorce papers after gifting one of these to someone.

Bonus sort of usable one. Sort of.

For people with good taste.

[turtleblogatlast]

Something I like about Leo is that he’s honestly really chill? It’s easy to remember the moments where he’s being obnoxious or excitable but I feel like most of the time he’s incredibly “go with the flow” and has an overall affable demeanor.

[daisybell-on-a-carousel]

If you think several are equally likely, who do you think would be apart of the furry community and suit publicly/at conventions/and or make videos/etc

[fauvester]

au where the el tigre tiger spirit is an ancient and sort of prehistoric spirit in the wildest reaches of the ghost zone, and the belt allows it to like... 1/4 possess someone (just giving them some extra powers [including retractible chain hands?? ghosts, idk] without affecting their personality)

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

The fandom can't make up its mind on what's supposed to be a joke and what's supposed to be serious because the show can't either half the time. It's a tonally disjointed mess that wants to have absurd over-the-top humor as well as a plot and moments of drama, romance, and angst that demand you see the characters as people and feel for what they're going through. Except you can't do that without also treating the dumb bullshit in a somewhat grounded way. Like, you're still dealing with the same characters. You can't just go "Oh, that? Let's ignore that!" the moment it's no longer convenient to you. You've opened this can of worms and now you have to sleep in it. So, every character flip-flops between two different versions of themselves depending on what the writers need in any particular scene.

This is not to say surreal humor can't be used right alongside characters you're supposed to empathize with, Teen Titans (not Go) did that and it worked. It's just that the absurdity can only come from the setting (Mad Mod, Mother Mae-Eye, pretty much anything Control Freak is in) or from designated joke characters (Date With Destiny). Teen Titans never had the main characters acting in clearly absurd ways as the butt of a joke unless those characters were brainwashed somehow, because the writers knew that would ruin any of the more grounded moments they wanted to write. The writers of Miraculous missed the memo on that one.

I don't disagree. A perfect example is Derision where the show takes all of the bad jokes about Marinette's crush and decides to take them seriously as if you can possible take them seriously without making Marinette come across as unhinged and dangerous. You can't, which brings us to the topic at hand: how do you even begin to understand these characters when the show is constantly making character-breaking choices?

My approach - and the approach I recommend others take if they're going to keep watching the show - is to focus on the characters' cores and reject anything canon does to violate those cores. I don't argue for this stance because I love the characters so much that I only want the good things to count. I take this stance because, if you don't, then the characters fall apart. There is no way to make them work as fully realized characters while embracing every choice canon has made. Miraculous has massive characterization issues that go well beyond the humor.

For example, Adrien has multiple moments of terrible behavior that are played in a serious manner such as the moment in the episode Frozer where he tries to start a fight with Ladybug in the middle of an akuma attack because she wouldn't accept a rose from him earlier:

Setup

Ladybug: I can't accept this rose from you. I told you already. I'm in love with someone else. Cat Noir: I know, M'lady. But if he weren't here, would things be different between us? Ladybug: Well, you know, I can't even begin to imagine him not being here. I'm sorry, Cat Noir. I really gotta get going, and you better do the same. (Swings her yo-yo to head back home; Cat Noir is sad, looking downwards, with one petal of the rose falling.)

Payoff

Ladyice: Cat Noir. We need to set up a trap for whoever turned the city into a giant ice rink. (throws yo-yo) Icecat: (bitterly) My feline instincts prefer to track and observe before I attack. You go your way, I'll go mine. Ladyice: Please don't tell me you're mad at me about the rose. Icecat: There may be a certain chill now between us. Ladyice: I get it, but we should really focus on saving Paris right now. Icecat: We don't always have to do everything together, after all. It's not like we're a couple. (skates away)

There's no way to argue this off as a bad joke. While Adrien has every right to feel hurt, those feelings don't excuse him acting like a pouting child in the middle of an akuma fight. It doesn't excuse him acting like this at any point! Ladybug is not a villain for telling him no. She wasn't even mean about it!

I clearly fully agree that Adrien looks awful and selfish here, but I'd still argue that it's not something that should be used to define Adrien's character if your goal is to tell the "ideal" version of Miraculous. "Ideal" being the version that canon seems to be going for based on the overall picture we can sort of make out if we back way, way, way up and look at the extremely abstract picture canon is clumsily painting.

Unless canon is going to do something monumentally stupid, Adrien is Marinette's endgame romantic interest. It's also clear that there is no plan to cut him from the team. He's going to be Chat Noir for the rest of his life or at least well into his adulthood. This means that he is supposed to be a good hero who deserves his miraculous just like he's supposed to be a charming and cute romantic lead. These are the two things I keep in mind when trying to shift through canon to figure out what writing choices I should fully embrace and what writing choices I have to either ignore or treat as true flaws that get an actual character arc. In my book, either approach is fine because most of the characters are deeply flawed at this point and you can't give them all arcs without bloating the story to nonsense levels.

My goal with this approach is never to say, "oh, that moment shouldn't count in terms of how people feel about the character." It's more, "that moment goes so hard against who this character is very clearly supposed to be that I can't take it into account if I want to tell the kind of story that Miraculous is trying (and clearly failing) to tell."

As an example, let's list off Adrien's worst behaviors. The things that make him look terrible:

He sucks at communicating his needs and feelings, leading to multiple moments where he gets mad at Ladybug for things she's totally unaware of

He has quit or considered quitting without warning multiple times and only one of those was because of something he did "wrong" (NYC Special)

He puts his feelings before the safety of Paris on multiple occasions, even going so far to purposely miss akuma fights to see what happens

He is incredibly pushy about his crush, often ignoring Ladybug's feelings on the topic by continuing to bring it up even after she asked him to stop

There have been multiple instances where he almost cataclysmed multiple people in a fit of anger

His love for Ladynette isn't strong enough to let him break free of things like akumas and nightmare dust even when he's looking her in the eyes making him a pretty crappy romantic lead

People will argue that some of this behavior makes sense for his character because of the abuse that canon has technically introduced, but that the writers seem blissfully unaware of. I don't disagree with that argument, but that doesn't change the fact that none of this is acceptable behavior for a hero and Adrien is a hero who keeps doing these things. A sad backstory doesn't give you the right to behave poorly without consequences.

At the same time, if I fully embrace these elements of canon, what I get is an Adrien salt fic where he loses his miraculous for good while Marinette finds her real true love or even just a non-salty fic where Adrien leaves for his own meatal health and gets replaced by someone who can handle being a hero right now. Canon's not writing either of those, so the only way to engage with these flaws while enjoying canon or aiming for the same end goals as canon is to say, "I guess this doesn't count" or "I guess I need to tone this way down and work through it via a character arc" or even "I guess that was just a bad joke maybe?"

That is the essence of what I mean when I call myself a writing salt, character sugar blog. It comes from looking at canon and seeing that there's simply no way to embrace the worst moments and the best at the same time. We're not dealing with a coherent plot and/or complex characters. We're dealing with a nonsense plot that will warp the characters to bizarre shapes to make random ideas work even if those idea go wildly against canon's end goals.

As an example, Glaciator and Frozer should not exist in the same universe or, at the very least, something should explain why Chat Noir randomly changed his stance on Ladybug's crush from acceptance to pushiness. As is, the pieces don't fit together. The behavior is too contradictory. Remember, this is how Glaciator ends:

Perhaps Ladybug will love me someday. I mean, like, I love her. I have to believe. In the meantime, her friendship is the best gift of all.

Where did this version of Adrien go? Why did he regress in Frozer? There's no in-universe reason. It happened because the writers weren't ready to let the love square date or grow close, but they also wanted the love square to cause drama, so Adrien ends up looking terrible just like Marinette ends up looking terrible when it's her turn to cause love square drama. Her terribleness takes a different flavor so it can be hard to realize that this is a systemic issue, but that's what it is. It's deeply frustrating, but it also clearly stems from cheap writing and not quality characterization.

This is also why my stance is that canon as a whole only supports my Doyalistic core-character analysis style of approach. The writing is too poor quality to do Watsonian analysis where you embrace the full picture and try to put it all together. The closest I'll get to Watsonian analysis is pointing out how much the writing botches a Watsonian take by showing you all the way the writing contradicts itself, twisting into a nonsense pretzel of frustration where the payoffs never satisfy! (See the season four rant for an example or anything where I talked about Chloe's supposed damnation arc.)

There are even characters where canon is such a total mess that you can Doyalistically argue for two separate takes! Gabriel is a perfect example. He is all over the place and his ending was so poorly handled that you can make strong arguments for writing him as a cold-hearted villain or a sympathetic villain without the end result feeling like it spits in the face of canon because both takes maintain his one core element: villain.

That's the big thing I keep in mind when I look at the characters and the lore and the plots and try to come up with versions that the average fan would like. I don't think that there's one true version of any of these things, but I do feel comfortable saying that there are versions that will very clearly only appeal to people who are salty about a specific thing that canon did poorly. That's not who I want to appeal to in my adaptions, so while I'm not going to argue that those takes have no backing in canon, I will argue that those takes are not supported by canon as a whole. Embracing them requires you to take the worst parts of canon at face value while ignoring what canon is clearly trying to do with the overall story.

I get the appeal of that, but it's not fun for me because that approach feels like rolling around in the mud with the pigs. I don't want to sink to canon's level! I want to have fun! That's why I talk about how to make canon into its best self, not its worst self. If you want its worst self, just go watch the actual show. I will be shocked it if disappoints you.

[pyrrhiccomedy]

The Invasion of England - 1358.

King of France, warrior and usurper, witch and novitiate, traitor and fool:

You think to come here?

On your stolen ships, with your infernal cannon, with your swords, with your armies, with the creatures who attend you -

You think to stand on Albion?

You have claimed your crown upon unthinking Christian soil. Lulled to sleep by your church, by your crosses, by your golden harvests, and your wide, straight roads: France is a maiden, innocent and new. You were unopposed except by men: our sister-land welcomed her groom.

England is no virgin.

Your ships land on bitter soil. Your men camp in watchful woods. Our battlefields have drank the blood of more eldritch things than you.

You come in your arrogance, in your strength, on a horse named Death, promises on your lips and an empire in your eyes:

But England will swallow you whole.

[housewifebuck]

[trainingdummyrabbit]

i still think abt the ending to the warp intervallo also. it was like, okay, to me, mostly, but. Don Qui Moment. im just so so elated we got to see her Unstoppable Forward Momentum(tm) used in a way that wasnt at least partially a "Oh There She Goes Again 🙄" thing. like. That Bit There. not the 'oh shes a bloodfiend' bit, but the 'dragging herself to fight on even through wounds that full well should have completely incapacitated her' thing. thats what i really really wanted to see most from her. its that sparking, again.

like i do quite enjoy her for being a silly lil scrambley thing!! but also she is capable of so much violence and she should be able to kill whoever she wants for ever. basically. the sheer fucking will and vitriol. having her values and planting her feet and Not Fucking Budging. let her. let her!!

but especially because its such a defining character trait, for donqui. specifically Before the. All Of That. [motions to c7]. because it feels like a striking point for Her, that She chooses, that isnt just "shes the silly character ^w^" or, past that, a side effect of the state shes in. its her own little brand of being a fucked up little creature, and i so badly wish we got to see more of it.. put some respect on my girls name !!!!!

[moonshynecybin]

oxley bom podcast saying they have a very reliable source claiming gigi wants marc in ducati. um. putting aside all the material implications of that (potential championships etc) pecco and marc teammates oh my. poor pecco marc is going to psychologically destroy him without even realising he's doing it. and don't get me started on the rosquez of it all

i think it will literally be so funny because. if marc smokes his ass (he’s literally never not smoked a teammate. literally never. and it’s different now but not. THAT different. anddd pecco almost got got by jorge martin last year lest we forget) pecco i fear may not recover. like pecco rules he’s SO good at riding the ducati because he looks at it like this super methodical machine that he understands inside and out and studies the data and is in general very cerebral about it vs marc “raw talent intuition and adaptability” marquez potentially coming in and shaking his identity concerning what it means to be the number one down ducati rider to. the core. potentially a very fun saw trap for leedle peccochino. kind of specifically designed to ping all of his little neuroses. what happens when studying is not enough and someone (who you DO not like but CANNOT HELP holding in high regard because of his talent) comes in to yourrrrrrr team and potentially stunts on you. what do you even DO. and pecco i think tries really hard to be mature and above it all but. HES REALLY NOT

[leafatlaw]

I know I’ve said this on previous liveblogs, but rolan is so fucking angry at Rand, to such a higher degree than Rand is. Like, Rand pokes at Rolan alot, but most of it is in a less serious way, while Rolan everytime he takes a Jab at Rand he wants it to hurt. He wants to hurt Rand sooo badly all the time, especially during the first episode.

For example, when Rand is upset that Rolan didn’t distract his mom from Kian, he says, “You were always really reliable, weren’t you,” very rude and clearly a dig at Rolan leaving him. Problem is, that Rolan essentially responds with, “Getting away from you was the best decision I ever made.” Which is, a fucking crazy thing to say, and is so much more than Rands passive aggressive comment. Rand wants to hurt Rolan, the way he hurt him, he wants to get back at him for leaving, but all his insults just revel how much he missed Rolan, and his own hurt. But Rolan is sooo possed at being back here, he shifts all of that anger onto Rand (of course he also missed Rand, but he’s been able to move on in a way Rand hasn’t even dreamed of)

[reiney-weather]

my heart in the dimly lit aisle

Heyyyy so I just got around to drawing one of my absolute favorites from @nextsoundofthefuture !!! bright <333 followers expect more and also read the comic because it’s so good. firmly gripping my brain also

[moe-broey]

IMMEDIATELY REPOSTING THIS BC THIS IS A DREAM COME TRUE FOR ME. ALFONSE CÉLINE FRIENDSHIP REAL. TO ME‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️

[nebty]

Wow I hate it here.

At this point Good Omens getting cancelled once and for all will be worth it if I never have to read another mealy-mouthed excuse for Neil Gaiman Serial Rapist’s disgusting actions ever again.

[nartml]

Daily reminder that calling Sasuke a badly written emo scumbag because he responded to his trauma in a way that displeased you isn't actually valid

[katierosefun]

modern family is all fun and games until you get to the scenes where you burst into tears because the once-vaguely homophobic dad now refers to his son's husband as family, and also the academically gifted daughter realizes that her dorky, clumsy dad was always really proud of her and just never surprised because he just assumed she could do anything, and also the eldest daughter who eloped comes crawling back to her parents' room and whispers that she still wants her parents to be present for her wedding, and also the anxious queer lawyer character admits that he was terrified that his husband would just leave him alone with their baby daughter, and also that the once-vaguely grouchy dad looks at his stepson and tells him that what makes a family is who sticks around, not who you're blood-related to and anyways what was i saying