#That's why both heaven and hell want to destroy everyone (an evil act) and why az is a bitch and C is a bit of a dork

[bijoumikhawal]

I keep thinking about that post that said they needed protestant guilt in sh*womens fic. Biggest evidence I shouldn't bother with season 2

[katyspersonal]

Alright Suspiciously Cheerful Katy, for that ask meme, I want THOTS on MARIKA plzzzzzz

Look at her fabulous hair ffs

THOTS on Marika, you say......

( Asks from this ( x ) meme)

Favorite thing about them:

It is really hard to point out something concrete! She is a very complex and well-written character, who has done a lot of bad and a lot of good, not to mention grandiose presence in the lore and worldbuilding! She appeared very cold and cruel through her words passed along and actions that we've learned about, but then there has also always been fixation on life, light, bounty and prosperity! I struggle to find a compromise between her war criminal oppressor side and her striving to create a warm heaven for self and others side! But maybe that's the point; big, strong, legendary, impactful figures in history always did BOTH bad and good, but become immortalised in history as just one of these dualities! When shaping history is always both creating and destroying! This is how 'shaping' works!

^^^ I like that she gives people a choice! Just like an actual idea of 'God' without being distorted; you have safety, love and purpose if you cooperate and you can choose struggle without any guidance if you want to! That some people can interpret as that "serve in heaven rule in hell" shit

^^^ I also like that she encouraged people that put faith in her to actually think! This is basically encouraging Fundamentalism which is "scholarship in all but name", but she doesn't want people to just blindly follow; she wants them to understand WHY they'd follow!

But I think above all, I like her tragedy of failing to build this perfect world and how it ends. I talked just recently about it in the post ( x ) about what was it that Gideon saw in "her will" that made him turn against everything prior, but in short: she wanted to keep the world in the state of permanent disarray, just as long as it doesn't recover and perpetuate the Golden Order.

The thing about a new Lord coming to her to be her consort and thus fixing everything? That's what Two Fingers had everyone believe and wanted, not her. :p She probably knew that she can't die by Shattering nor by a hand of a human, though maybe left a hope someone will find a way by urging Hewg to keep striving for a god-slaying weapon. But if she, and thus, Elden Ring, can't be killed, people can just stay away from it forever. That Gideon understood and we didn't and he deserves more credit for it fdshfdh

I compare her with Gwyn often, as they are the same trope of Fromsoft character: a divinity that tried to build a better world yet did a lot of evil to accomplish it and it was, tragically, corrupt by good intentions! But she did one thing he didn't: she was smart enough to know where it was going and oppose perpetuating cycle! Gwyn sacrificed himself to reignite what he gave to the world, Marika sacrificed herself to undo it! I know many people dislike this trope, as "the bad guy gets redeemed by sacrifice instead of doing a harder thing of staying alive and FIXING things they've done!", which is valid! But here it is not necessarily given as a noble act that "redeems" her, nor exposed as "cowardly" act! The narration allows us to interpret it however we want, but the real thing here: it is a human act. It was not rational or wise, but it sure was full of remorse

Basically I think I want to say, for a human, she made a pretty great God all things considered, because she was thinking about world and future and people, not just self.

Least favorite thing about them:

Her playing karma ping-pong with Hornsent and alike, for the lack of better term. 🙄 I believe that Omen curse was a direct result of the Crusade! Not even just because Grandam mentions it, it can always be a localisation error! But because it is logical: wraits, who are spirits of the dead mind you, haunting Omens, are horned! Like, yes, sure, her cruelty to the last Fire Giant and all blahblahblah, but girl what is this Omen Twins situation? They are your own children! They, and other Omens, already suffer with horrifying nightmares paying for YOUR sins, don't make it worse by either isolating them or encouraging "healing" them with heavy lethal rate procedure!

Betrayal means she was a trusted figure for them! As in, she held the power and influence enough to potentially help to gradually rid Hornsent culture of dangerous beliefs and practices! Like integrate them a bit more in the population under Erdtree that is largerly hornless, help them to see nobody is more or less divine, all that.. The cycle could have ended with HER! But she chose the grief and pain over healing (and Messmer probably amplified it, Crow I know you're dying to post that serpent theme is not incidental, you are not slick!!!)

She could have ended all this, she had the power! Why Ancient Dragons could have it but not them? We all know why: personal trauma. And yes, this is so sad, and so realistic, and I love this WRITING, but I can ALSO judge a character! Though, her actions ricocheting into whole Vengeance-Seeking Hornsent NPC's character was ALSO a good writing... argh

Favorite line:

"Hear me, Demigods. My children beloved. Make of thyselves that which ye desire. Be it a Lord. Be it a God. But should ye fail to become aught at all, ye will be forsaken. Amounting only to sacrifices..."

I am still not sure what is the context! Was it something she said upon already deciding on the Shattering, as foreshadowing for what infights will unravel? Or her mother skills were Just Like That, as she viewed her children first of all as tools of building a better world and being helpful powers to it, not as those living just for the heck of it? Silly, but the latter interpretation is basically a problem that existed in Disney's movie Encanto, where Alma would find a use for community in all family members with special powers but neglected the one born without any xD Anyways, badass quote no matter what was the context for it!

brOTP:

Does..... does Marika have friends? Many are either her family in one way or another or her lovers. xD I think Hewg qualifies the best, as wild as it sounds; Misbegotten are viewed as impure within her order and he speaks of her from obvious imbalanced position of reverence, but despite everything, she confided in him! It feels like a tragedy of people who were meant to be close friends but too much time was gone because of circumstances, decisions of the past which aftermaths lasted for centuries to taint everything, mistakes and absence of one of the sides (oh I wonder who... 🙄) or simply meeting too late in life. You can't tell me they didn't wish they'd met sooner / they could go back in time / whatever your interpretation is!

OTP:

I think she and Godfrey definitely deserved each other! They are a fun pair of war criminals! Marika trusts him a lot for sure! I think it was not just by being impressed by his power and fierceness as it is, but maybe something sadder, though? After learning the Shaman Village lore, I can't help but feel that she'd seek a very big and strong person capable of crashing her enemies FOR her on instinctive level. Because that terrified, defenceless girl is still somewhere deep inside.. Even past the point she herself can wield a hammer JUST fine! SHE was the one who killed Fell God, not him! :p I think he understood that and saw it not as being a tool, but on the contrary, felt honored that he could be of support.

^^^ At the same time, this line made me wonder whether Marika divested him and his warriors of grace for his sake, sort of? Even with Serosh on his back, he still values a good battle and power! I think their relationship were held on battles! When there is no enemy for them to defeat, or in most cases, for him to defeat for her sake, he would just start to wither. Passion between them likely was low when he hadn't defeated anyone recently! :p She was bitter about it, maybe thought a bit lower of him seeing that he is physically incapable of enjoying life without a good battle and her love is not enough, but knew it would be better for him and group he created to at least fight elsewhere rather than just be Standing There while things are alright!

It feels to me like relationship that can only blossom under certain circumstances, even if for an unhappy reason! They might even have conflicts; her being appalled at a person that doesn't wish peace, as someone who went through hell and wished nothing more than that, and him being weirded out at how someone wishes to stagnate when to live is to ever assert yourself. And this is valid! Conflict is healthy! Their issues meet one another the right way!

nOTP:

Again: I will know it when I see it! She makes every ship interesting and fun, it seems! ....all 3.5 ships with her that even exist lol fdhjfhd

Random headcanon:

I know that Radagon studied incantations, but I do not think these are actually his! Marika is a NERD! Her bedchamber is FULL of scrolls and scripted stone plates! She likes to study... and to preserve!

These plates and scrolls are the same that are found in Specimen Storehouse. I do not think that they are strictly connected with the research on how to recover Shamans from the jars; if anything, you'd think she gave up on it long ago, especially since Shadow Realm was severed from the Lands Between. But they are valuable knowledge and history!

I am just trying to say, she is the type to keep remnants of culture and history, including which she was responsible for destruction of. There are tanks and shields modelled after Fire Giants so people still remember the fear that evaded them, but I also think that Stormveil had Godskins' Prayerbook in it because Godrick stole it from Leyendell! Marika still preserves history, Messmer' Fire Knights still preserve history.... yeahhh, Messmer is an odd one out wishing to just burn everything down. -_-

Unpopular opinion:

I do love to compare her with Gwyn, however? The takes like "Marika is so complex and morally grey and well-written whereas Gwyn just likes genocide" AND the takes like "it is funny how Marika is just Gwyn but so much more evil and worse in every way" irritate me a bit! When they're not in a joke way! They are both very well-written, both wished for a better world yet built it on blood, both feared fire/darkness respectively, both ended up doing more harm than good despite noble intentions, and although with different purpose, both sacrificed themselves!

....and both fall for either idealisation or demonisation. As well as one being hyped above another. "Oh Gwyn was such a great character, Marika is just a bleak copy, Fromslop can never repeat the former success" vs "Oh Marika is such a huge improvement in writing, Gwyn was really bland in comparison, really just a draft for actually good character in the future".... 🤦‍♂️ Let's NOT pit the bad bitches against each other any more!!

Song I associate with them:

(It is on German, so version with English lyrics!)

Favorite picture of them:

Aside of @val-of-the-north absolutely horrible drawn memes featuring her that had me floored and screaming like a seagull ( x ) ( x ), it is this image??

I don't know who made this meme, I just had it saved somewhere and it makes me laugh so much because yes, this is exactly what playing ER is like hfdhfdshdfs

[deadjaywalking]

So... I really enjoy writing dialog, I think is fun. I just wrote John Constantine talking to Lucifer for my story that I'm actively publishing on ao3. Who's afraid of little old me. About John and Dick grayson being together.

I love John as a character I think he is so interesting and he has so many sides to him. I hope I'm making him justice.

Here's what I wrote:

John Constantine watched the club from across the street as he smoked his last cigarette. The last time he saw Lucifer, they hadn't ended on the best of terms. But that wasn't unusual, for either of them. Asking help was. He sighed before going in, grumbling to him "The things I do for you Dickie". If it wasn't for the threat to Dick's life, he would never have come here, the world be damned. But Nergal was forcing his hand.

The place was filled with demons, but not the ones he was actively fighting, at least. There were some humans, but not many. Maze was behind the bar, her eyes closed in on him like a predator looking at prey. It was mostly an act, she just didn't like him.

- Hello Maze, where is the big man? - John asked when he reached her.

- I hope you are here trying to get into my pants Constantine, because otherwise the answer is no. - Lucifer said from behind him, not giving Maze time to answer.

- Didn't you hear Lucy? I'm taken now. - John turned around, with a smile. It was for show, and he hoped Lucifer would play along. At least for long enough to entertain the idea of helping him.

- Oh yes yes, all hell has heard of your little Dick. - John didn't seem amused, which made Lucifer laugh even more. - Come on now John, what makes you think I'm going to help you? Hell growing bigger and taking on earth isn't something I'm against. Considering I'm their king.

- It almost seems like you don't know me at all. Nergal didn't just threatened the world, I wouldn't come to you for that. He threatened Dick, and I can't let everyone think it's okay to do that. It wouldn't go well with my reputation. - John and Lucifer both knew it wasn't about that, they both knew John was scared. - I just need Nergal off the table. And for that i need to use something of yours.

- Again, why would I care? Why should I help you? He is a fellow demon after all. - Lucy said, with a dark look. Not many could tell, but he was considering John's offer.

- Because he wants to take over the earth and with that power, take your throne. I know you wouldn't actually care if he takes it, but it would hurt your ego. Nergal has been after your power since the beginning, he want to have something over your head. Are you really going to let him?

- What makes you think I won't kill him and take the earth from him? Honestly I'm a little offended you seem to think Nergal is worse than me.

- Nergal can't be killed. He will always come back. I could destroy him, for that I don't need you. But every time he regains his strength he will come after Dick and me. I'm getting tired of this game we have and I want it done with. - John said, knowing Lucifer wasn't actually offended, but intrigued. It was a dangerous thing, because if he determined John had wasted his time, he was done for. - I need your cage. I have enough power to lock him in, I just need your key. And I would be doing you a favor because if he is locked inside, it can never be used against you again.

That's what it all came down to, Lucifer couldn't say no. Nergal would be out of the way, so he wouldn't have to get his hands dirty dealing with him. The cage would be in use, so his father couldn't lock him up again.

- You know I won't stop anyone from trying to take the earth, right? I don't actively participate in evil plans anymore, but I'm not good either. Don't forget who I am John Constantine, it would be your worst mistake.

- I don't care about the world, I don't care about earth, heaven and hell. As long as Dick is out of Nergal's hands, or anyone else who dares to try and hurt him, I'm satisfied.

- You've been trying to save your soul for decades, and you'll give it up for a man? John... you humans are so pitiful. - Lucifer answer with a wicked smiled, his human face slowing transforming into his demonic one. His eyes were glowing, his skin was red like blood and his teeth were sharp like a blade. - Tell me, what is it that your hearts most desires?

- I... I... I want Dick to be safe and happy. - John said, with his eyes wide open, bloodshot and trembling. As the words came out of his mouth, he came out of the spell.

- I can't believe my eyes, John Constantine has been honest about his intentions for the first time in his life. The last time I asked you that, you said you wanted to be redeemed. You wanted to save yourself. I guess I misjudged you John. Very well, I'll help you. But know this, the next time you ask something of me, it will cost you and it will cost you big time. - Lucifer made the key appear out of nowhere and handed it to John. - The cage is guarded with my most trusted lieutenants. If you want it, you'll have to go through them. Good luck John, now get out of my bar.

[aceofwhump]

(Go2 spoilers)

THE LAST EPISODE? opinions about the episode?

SPOILERS BELOW THE CUT!!! Mildly incoherent keyboard smashing below

OH MY GOD!!!

I AM HEARTBROKEN!!! I was crying during the entire end scene!!!! Legitimately sobbing sitting on the edge of my, mouth hanging open in shock!

But it's like a good heartbroken? Okay so first of all I fucking love angst. I think that's pretty obvious here lol. So watching all the angst between the two of them in last few minutes was a delicious kind of heartbreaking! And I fully plan on making gifs especially of Aziraphale's angsty face. Cause god its beautiful.

And David Tennant and Michael Sheen are just so so amazing at their jobs and their acting during that scene was PHENOMENAL. They had me on the edge of my seat, crying like a heartbroken teenager. It takes a lot to get me to react like that to a show especially lately but David and Michael destroyed me.

And I personally think this is AMAZING writing/plotting. Of course this will on depend on Amazon giving us season 3 so everyone better watch the crap out of this season okay! Because season 2 focused a lot on Crowley and his realizations of feelings so I'm expecting season 3 will see Aziraphale let go of this picture of Heaven = Good and Hell = Bad thing and realize he loves Crowley and wants to be with him forever and the teo of them will talk and apologize and work things out and end up in the cottage in South Downs. That's the ending I'm sure we'll get. But we need to get there and there was bound to be angst on the way. This kind of angst feels so in character to me and feels right. Not all things are happy all the time and sometimes angst is good for plot development. This is GOOD ANGST! This will further the plot, create a viable route for character development that will inevitably give us our happy ending!

I know a lot of people are upset by it in like an angry why kind of way but I LOVE IT! I LOVE IT A LOT!

And a few random thoughts:

I never pictured Crowley being the first to make a move and I was so proud of him for putting himself out there and asking Aziraphale to stay with him and they can just be an us and then going further and showing his feelings by kissing him! It was beautiful and deep and scary and wonderful and I DIED! And his face and body language after Aziraphale did the thing was SO HEARTBREAKING! DAVID AND MICHAEL ARE SO GOOD AT THEIR JOBS!

And Aziraphale! Oh my god this angel is killing me! All he wants is to be with Crowley! He didn't give a shit about the Metatrons offer until he said Aziraphale could make Crowley an angel again and they could be together. Look at his smile in that scene! That made him so happy! He could be with Crowley and they could go home and be good angels again! In his head thats the perfect ending! They would be home together, doing good work and Crowley could make things again and ask his questions without fear of retaliation. Aziraphale remembers how happy Crowley was at the beginning, making his stars and galaxies, and believes Crowley wants that again. He also always believed in Crowley's goodness AND Aziraphale is still stuck in the belief of Heaven and angels being inherently good and the good guys while Hell and Demons are inherently evil and the bad guys. So he still believes that they should both be up in Heaven.

But Crowley knows the truth! Crowley sees that both sides are toxic and that for the two of them to be happy they need to be just the two of them like they have been these past few years. And they were happy! So he tries to get that through Aziraphale but Aziraphale isn't ready to hear that.

THEN THE KISS HAPPENS AND AZIRAPHALE ISN'T READY FOR IT AND HE ENDS UP BREAKING CROWLEYS HEART EVEN THOUGH AZIRAPHALE DOES LOVE HIM AND YOU CAN SEE HIS HEARTBROKEN CONFUSED AND IN LOVE FACE AFTER CROWLEY LEAVES AND AZIRAPHALE TOUCHES HIS OWN LIPS!!!

I AM FUCKING DYING NONNY!!! I'M DYING!!! IM LOSOMG MY MIND AND I KNOW THERE ARE OTHERS THINGS I WANTED TO TALK ABOUT. IT I CANNOT THINK STRAIGHT!!!

[itsclydebitches]

RWBY Recaps: Volume 8 “The Final Word”

Well, we made it to the finale, everyone, and if you're reading this it seems you've survived the watching of it too. Barely. To say that some questionable choices were made across these 20 minutes is... an understatement.

But before we delve into the episode, I want you to cast your mind back to November 7th, 2020. A horrible year that heralded a horrible RWBY volume. There, coming off the shaky writing of Volume 7, I posed a number of questions and concerns that the show needed to tackle, with the promise that we would return to these expectations in four months time. Now, here we are! Let's refresh everyone's memory, yeah?

Taken directly from that recap, what RWBY promised us, through various teasers and Q&As, included:

Emphasis on Ruby’s leadership and how Summer’s death has impacted her

Insight into Ren and Nora’s flaws

May Merigold will supposedly have a larger part

More information about The Long Memory (Ozpin’s cane)

Theme of the volume is that you can respect someone but that doesn’t necessarily mean you agree with them

Very short timeline (supposedly just two days)

Yang in particular is very suspicious and distrustful

And you know what? They did all this. In the spirit of being fair and honest to this show, RWBY succeeded in delivering on everything they promised... it was just our foolishness that expected that these ideas would be delivered well. Ruby's leadership took center stage in the form of her hiding for multiple episodes and then others telling her she's still The Best before the plot dropped a solution into her lap... one she could have used at any point prior to this. Summer's death certainly has an impact, though it's an impact born of a crazy reveal that Summer likely isn't dead, but turned into a horrifying grimm monster. Ren and Nora both delve into their flaws, but heaven forbid either grow from that reflection. Ren learns that if he pushes past his primary flaw of keeping his emotions buried and actually expresses his doubts for once, he'll be yelled at and ignored until he admits how wrong he was. The "real" flaw is being a bad friend, with "bad friend" equaling "Not agreeing with Ruby 100%." Meanwhile, Nora considers that maybe she shouldn't rush in recklessly and hit things with her hammer... which is why she rushes in recklessly, hits something with her hammer, gets grievously injured, and is told that this is just who she truly is. No growth there, not unless we count her sudden desire to figure out who she is without Ren... but that exploration hasn't started yet. Too bad she wasn't the teammate separated at the end of the volume!

Meanwhile, May did indeed have a larger role to play, one I quite liked, it's just that this role — like all the others — inevitably circled back to realizing how wonderful Ruby is. May challenges Ruby to make a decision, but instead of being the catalyst for Ruby's growth, May becomes another forgotten side character who does a sudden about-turn regarding her perspective, leaving the group with the contradictory message that Ruby is actually doing her best, she's just a kid, no need to try any harder... everyone who claimed otherwise up until now was mistaken. May is another Cordovin. She's another Qrow. She's another Maria.

Fun fact: we don't even know if Maria is alive right now. That's how little she means to the show!

Actually, wait... anyone remember this nonsense from Volume 7? 

I was too lazy to change the date.

Moving on, Ozpin's cane turned out to be a stakes obliterating bomb that came out of nowhere, makes no sense logistically — how do battles store energy that only hurts grimm? — yet nevertheless seems to have killed Hazel? It's a disaster of unanswered questions. Similar to the disaster of our two day timeline when, I'm fairly sure, we've had an unnatural number of sunrises and sunsets. I'll have to take a look back at the volume as a whole now that it's complete to be sure of that though. As for our themes... did we really explore the idea of respecting someone even if you disagree with them? Because Ironwood wasn't shown any respect. Ren wasn't shown respect. I think the closest we got was Oscar calmly validating Yang's worry about getting buddy-buddy with Emerald, but the whole point there was that Yang was wrong. She wasn't wrong, but that's what the text would have you believe. She is indeed "very suspicious and distrustful," but that's hardly unjustified in these circumstances. I'm still boggling at the fact that it took the group three volumes for forgive Ozpin, even while he was actively working to assist them, yet I-helped-destroy-Beacon-and-tried-to-kill-everyone-you-love Emerald is the group's new BFF after she... ran away with Oscar? She didn't save him, she just went along for the ride. At the very least we might have gotten a scene where Penny was like, "Hey, why are you all laughing with the woman who just tried to kill my dad?"

But oh yeah, the story doesn't remember Pietro exists either. His daughter is DEAD and he hasn't been on screen since Episode Five, let alone there when she passes.

I had my own list going in, including such expectations as "Ozpin bb you got done dirty please acknowledge this" and "Queer baiting, queer baiting… you’re on thin ice at this point, RWBY. Just skate on over to the queer snack bar before you fall straight into the lake." Obviously these needs were not met.

So what, given this mess of expectations, did we end up with?

Our finale — for some reason — breaks the one word title trend with "The Final Word." It's an expression that refers to the final word in an argument or a discussion, the idea of winning by making a last, devastating point. It can also refer to making the final decision on something, which is the best way I'm able to apply the title to this episode (outside of any “final” comparisons). Penny's death is certainly all about choice and making some kind of decision... but on the whole, this title doesn't feel like it fits well. Not like "Worthy" or "Creation" or "Risk." The two latter titles had obvious connections to the episode in question through dialogue and plot, while the former was a deliberate callback to Watts' speech. "The Final Word" feels... less obvious in what it’s trying to say.

That's a minor nitpick though. Let's get into the meat of the episode.

We open on the grimm whale still disappearing, which is weird. I get that it's massively bigger than any other grimm we've seen, but they all turned to dust near instantaneously and it's been, what? At least an hour since Oscar blew it up? Likely longer when we factor in their walk back to the manor, the fight with Ironwood, fixing Penny, and this entire evacuation. It certainly makes for a nice visual, but like so many details in RWBY, it raises unnecessary questions along the way.

The important bit though is that amidst the whale carcass a blob of evil is swirling about. Salem, obviously. 

She’s not reforming in time to actually do anything though, don't worry.

Instead, we cut to the Ironwood vs. Winter fight and there's at least some dialogue this time. Ironwood yells that he's sacrificed everything to keep Remnant safe. Winter yells back that he actually sacrificed everyone else. Obviously, Ironwood should be called out for things like, you know, his unprompted murders, but instead they have Winter listing stuff that she was never shown to have a problem with before. The embargo? "Squeezed Mantle until it broke?" She, as Ironwood's second hand, understood and supported both the decision to close the border and the need to collect resources for a plan designed to take out Salem. I hate that no only did she turn without an ounce of hesitation or grief, but now they're having her act as if Ironwood forced these decisions on everyone, rather than everyone supporting him through them. We all remember Volume 7 when Ruby pressured him to finish Amity, right? And in trust RWBY fashion, most of these words are meaningless. Mantle "broke"? What does that mean? The class disparity did not come about through Ironwood: that's been in the works for generations. The lack of resources made things harder, yes, but when they were reclaimed by Robyn nothing improved. Watts is the one who turned off the heat and Salem attacked Atlas, leaving Mantle alone. Now, all the citizens have escaped through magical portals. So how is Mantle "broken" exactly? More importantly, why is Winter upset over this vague, nonsensical dilemma when she could be yelling about Ironwood wanting to bomb Mantle?

Again: this woman watched Ironwood shoot the councilman, shrugged, and continued to believe in him up until she realized his bomb threat was real. That was one of the main reasons why I thought the councilman might be alive, with Ironwood only shooting a warning shot past him. Because this is how you react to a good person unexpectedly killing someone else

whereas this is what we got from Winter and Harriet.

Hell, Weiss has more of a reaction to Yang telling Ruby things aren't super great right now.

So either Ironwood didn't do something that bad, thereby justifying these tame reactions (unlikely, given where his character ended up), or we should believe based on the animation that everyone was super chill with him killing an unarmed civilian. Which is then directly contradicted when they're like, "You're going to shoot Marrow? Bomb a city?? How could you do such horrible things??? 😲" Friends, buddies, fictional pals... you already watched him murder a dude.

The point is, there's a lot for Winter to be upset about, but she's not upset about that. There's a lot that Winter herself believed in, but the writing has forgotten that. This entire arc went off the rails a volume ago.

Also, why is Ironwood fighting with that giant gun? This is his final battle, presumably ever, and he's wielding this awkward, sluggish weapon we saw him randomly pick up two episodes ago? Let him use his regular guns! Give us a fantastic battle like he had with Watts! Instead, RWBY's final showdown consists of him using this no-name weapon as a unwieldy club in some of the most boring choreography we've seen to date. It doesn't help that this fight needs to share time with three others. Instead of an epic showdown, we're given glimpses of the battle before continually cutting away from it. 

During that first cut we return to the Team RWBY battle where Penny, doing her best to stay out of Cinder's reach, is whisked away on Weiss' wasp.

Too bad she didn't do that for Yang...

Jaune and Nora watch this horror unfold until Jaune says, "Priority one!" and they split. Except... what is priority one exactly? Helping the civilians? I guess, because they don't enter the fight until the very end of it, when everyone else seems to have made it to Vacuo. And you know what, I like that. For once it feels like the group — or at least the B Team — is acting like huntsmen, putting the needs of the people over their own, personal desires. I'm sure Nora wants to help the group after Yang's (presumed) demise and that Jaune would like nothing more than to get his hands on Cinder, but they put those grievances aside to do the work they signed up for. Good job!

My only real gripe is that we don't really see this struggling in the animation, I'm just assuming it's there. In particular, there's a moment when Jaune sends Nora through the portal for reinforcements — not knowing they can't return — and they seem a little too jovial when, by this point, three friends have died.

There's letting your cast be supportive, and then there's having them ignore that three teammates have perished in an abyss. It really doesn't help to sell the idea that Yang, Ruby, and Blake are in any danger here.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Penny tells Weiss that since Cinder is really just after the Maiden powers, she can buy the rest of the group time to escape. Weiss, obviously, isn't fond of this idea... and then the both of them are blasted off the wasp by Cinder's fire. Which they deserve, frankly. They're just having this casual conversation about sacrifice while in the middle of a battle. Did they somehow forget that Cinder can fly too?

Note that multiple attacks from Cinder, another blast, and a hard landing on the pathway gives their auras a knock, but doesn't break them. The primary defense for Yang's aura shattering in a single, simple hit was that everyone is exhausted and running on little to no power... yet here the rest of the cast is, tanking multiple hits as we've come to expect. There is no explanation for Yang's defeat except that the writers chose to ignore the rules of their world for a dramatic death scene... even though that drama was erased a week later as half our team falls into the void too.

We'll get to that though. For now, Cinder corrects Penny's belief with "I want it all" and proceeds to try to finish them off, only for Blake to arrive, having made her choice from last episode about who to help. It's a legitimately nice attack, but I happened to pause at the bEST MOMENT

Anyway.

We leave that fight to return to Qrow and Harriet who have, off screen, started an entirely different battle. What I mean is, last we saw Qrow had broken through the windshield of the airship, roughly pinned Harriet, and was taunting her about getting the fight she wanted. Now, suddenly, he's going “You’re making a mistake, Harriet, what happened to Clover—” as if he's been trying to talk her down this whole time. It's jarring, especially when we consider that Qrow had a volume long "kill Ironwood" arc that was dropped because... Robyn reminded him that murder is bad? RWBY feels like a storytelling pinball machine. Characters bounce from one personality to the next, one perspective and another, round and round until you don't know where they'll end up.

Harriet screams for Qrow to just shut up already and honestly? Same. I love Qrow, he's one of my favorites, but I can't deny that he's been done dirty like so many others since Volume 6. I love who Qrow was, not the mess RWBY has created the last few years.

Time to delve back into fic after recapping!

Sadly though, this strange dialogue wasn't the only "wtf" moment. Harriet is still trying to drop the bomb — which is its own mess of confusing motivations — when Vine and Elm show up on Harriet's ship. Elm begs Harriet not to do this "because you’re our friend!”

Am I glad that they finally acknowledged that the Ace Ops have always been friends? Sure, but why did we spend two volumes claiming otherwise? They were friends, a fantastic team, then Harriet announces that's a lie and we get a bunch of "Team RWBY is superior because they're actually friends" messages. Except this entire time we're still watching the Ace Ops be kind and playful with one another. But they're not friends, the story says. Not friends as they fight these battles. Not friends as they grieve for Clover. Definitely not friends as they react in horror at Ironwood nearly shooting Marrow. No, there's nothing there... until Elm claims there is! Then Harriet reacts in shock. I have friends?

Except Elm was labeled the one "just following orders" by Yang. Elm is the one who shook off Vine after the whale exploded. This isn't the story of one character, Harriet, thinking she was alone and then realizing that people do care for her, this is a story that, seemingly at random, had this group being BFFs or acting like they hated each other — and at each point the visuals are contradicted by the story's message. When they act like friends, we're told they're not friends. When they don't act like friends, we're told they really have been this whole time. I mean, do any of them even care that Marrow teamed up with Qrow and Robyn to take them out five minutes ago? All three were going along with Ironwood's scheme until they were physically stopped, but now Elm is convinced this is a bad decision she needs to talk Harriet down from with the power of friendship?

None of these characters are characters, they're just slapped together reactions based on whatever the plot needs. Who is Elm? I've got no clue. Her personality changes every episode.

Also, love that Qrow moves to stop the bomb from dropping and Harriet screams at him to "Get out of the way!" rather than just... attacking him? She even throws her hands out like she's having a temper tantrum. This feels like schoolyard bickering, not a life or death struggle.

Even though, you know, the audience is aware that the people of Mantle have already been evacuated and Qrow's group is aware that Atlas is falling on top of Mantle as they speak, so... why does the bomb matter? It's going to, what? Destroy the city thirty seconds before Atlas does? Oh no, the horror.

Things then, if you can believe it, get even worse. The bomb is still about to drop, so instead of doing anything to stop it — I mean seriously, we know it takes four people to shoulder the bomb's weight, but you're telling me Qrow and a reformed Harriet can't snag it in a pinch? — Qrow sits there, looks at Clover's pin... and the bomb careens towards the side of the airship instead, stopping.

Because I guess Qrow has good luck now? Or always did and somehow never noticed it? Or his semblance evolved?? Again, we don't know, but it's a bad moment any way you slice it, imo. Qrow has always been defined as the guy with a bad luck semblance and, much like Penny's android struggles, the allure was in watching him overcome those challenges, not having the show erase the challenge entirely. Especially when we don't even understand how it was erased. Qrow just... stops drinking, stops caring for Ironwood, stops wanting to kill Ironwood, stops causing bad luck, I guess. RWBY takes major character traits and flips them off like a light switch, leaving the audience with no emotional tether. We didn't watch Qrow overcome his drinking, or realize he can't bear to kill Ironwood, or discover a way to live life with the horrible hand he was dealt, he just blinks one day and those things are gone. Why? No one is sure. Not even the writers, I'd wager, because otherwise they would have written explanations into the text.

Many in the fandom insist that any basic information provided by the story amounts to "hand holding" when in fact there is a massive difference between the sort of unnecessary exposition that bogs down a tale, and having facts enough for the audience in its entirety to be on the same page about what is actually happening. For example, recently someone argued strongly that the "Penny is human" take is incorrect because Penny isn't human, she has an inhuman body made entirely of aura... yet where in the world does this exist in the story? Ambrosius may have been unsure about what Penny would be prior to removing her robotic parts, but that ambiguity is gone once her body forms, the equivalent of worrying about that gun only for a flag with 'BANG' to appear instead of a bullet. Worrying about something doesn't mean that something actually occurred. Penny appears human, expresses human sentiments, and then, this episode, dies as a human. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck and succumbs to the mortal peril that all ducks face... it's probably a duck. As I said in a recent ask, I implore the fandom to stop writing RWBY's scripts for them. Or rather, do so in some amazing fanfics. Don't do it on critical posts as a means of insisting that your revision is canon.

So Qrow has good luck now, maybe, but this character change doesn't amount to anything because Watts remotely starts the bomb's countdown.

At least he’s entertaining and competent. We had that for a time. 

Back to the main battle, Neo is kicking Ruby's ass. Why? Because there's no consistency in power levels in this show. The ancient woman who hasn't fought in decades dances circles around Neo, highlighting how weak she supposedly is, yet now Neo dances circles around our main character. None of us should expect fights to follow the logic of the world, only what drama the plot wants to stir up. Ruby is eventually knocked down from a hard hit — yet her aura's intact! — and is saved at the last second by Weiss tossing Neo into one of the portals. 

Far more of a problem than the power leveling is that Ruby gives no indication here that Neo just murdered her sister. Again, that's what the characters are meant to believe, yet Ruby is as stoic as she would be fighting a bunch of White Fang grunts. If you showed this scene to a RWBY fan on its own and asked, "What do you think happened prior to this?" the answer would be, "Uh... nothing? Ruby is just fighting Neo like she did on the airship in Volume 3." Nothing about this scene — from dialogue to animation — sells the idea that Ruby just lost the person most important to her in the world.

When we do finally mention Yang, it's Weiss who goes, “Come on, we have to do this for Yang” and the delivery is... meh. Honestly, I normally don't pay much attention to the voice acting, but I had a problem with most of Weiss' lines this episode. The "Leave her alone!" during this fight and later a "Get back!" as she attacks Cinder both fell really flat for me. Given the devastation and charged emotion that's supposed to be here, we can't give her anything better than generic cries that, again, she’d throw at any grunt? In that later scene the animation absolutely helps sell Weiss' distress, but the dialogue is common and the delivery has no emotional punch, leaving it feeling like Yang is just hanging out in Vacuo and they promised they'd beat the baddies before catching up with her. No one but Blake is acting like Yang died.

In fact, we see more emotion from Ruby when Weiss shoves her back, taking the brunt of Cinder's blast.

Weiss' aura breaks, not that that's a danger or anything. Everyone falls before they're injured, Winter gets the Maiden powers, Ren barely has to fight. Losing aura in this show used to be a moment of peril, where just last volume Winter was bruised, bleeding, and now needs an assistive device because she had to continue a battle with no aura. Now it's a joke. Aura breaks left and right across the volume with no repercussions attached to that.

We see a bit of the Blake and Penny vs. Cinder fight where Cinder blasts Blake off the edge. Penny rushes after her because at least one character remembered that they can fly.

Ruby, meanwhile, remembers that she can fly when it benefits her. After getting hit down onto a lower level and watching Crescent Rose plummet, she taunts Neo into an attack with a move that's actually quite good. I like the confidence with which Ruby riles her up and I like the strategy of darting behind Neo to knock her off the path instead. “Whatever you wanted, I hope it was worth it."

The only thing I don't like is that this speed and ingenuity had to disappear to justify Yang falling.

Cinder breaks Ruby's aura from behind though, sending her over too and grabbing onto Neo's leg. In an obvious moment born of the trope, it looks as if Cinder is reaching to help Neo, only for her to snag the Relic instead. “You should have never threatened me," she tells Neo and to Ruby: "you should have never been born.” 

Love that they erased all that cool growth from last episode! And by "love" I mean "hate." As I said last recap, I'm not going to pretend that Cinder's character isn't riddled with problems, but realizing she was stronger by teaming up with Neo and Watts was one of the best things they've ever done for her. It made Cinder dangerous again and showed Watts' speech having a clear impact. It also made her more entertaining, creating a new dynamic among the three villains. Now though, Cinder is just... Cinder. The same boring, stupid Cinder we've had since Volume 4. She betrays Neo and then later betrays Watts.

So Cinder kicks Neo and Ruby both over the edge because why would we want to make her interesting? Neo falls, but Ruby has friends there to catch her! Unlike Yang. Jk. Weiss’ aura is gone and Blake actually tried both times, so major kudos for her. Using momentum supplied by Penny, she snags Ruby and hooks her weapon into one of the pathways... only for Cinder to cut the ribbon. Both plummet and once again Penny has a more believable reaction to all this, just like she did last week

Speaking of reactions, does anyone else find it weird that Cinder finally succeeded in killing Ruby and... doesn’t seem to care? 

No? Just me? 

At least we get that good animation with Weiss I was talking about before, even if the dialogue is lacking. I love that she snagged Blake's weapon and uses it to try and take out Cinder, shaking the whole time. Those are some great details. 

Back to the bomb, Qrow is trying to escape, but Harriet says there isn't enough time to get out of the blast range. "I've killed us all." Vine has the solution though, using his semblance to wrap up the airship, thus containing the blast when it goes off. His final words are to reassure Elm that he can give his life, "if it means saving all of my friends." Just in case you missed the part about the Ace Ops being super close this whole time. Even though they also weren’t. Trying to eat your cake too, RWBY? 

Frankly, I didn't feel much of anything during this scene, not when Vine made the sacrifice, nor when Elm and Harriet look on sadly while Robyn pilots them away (that's her contribution this episode). 

All I can say is, good on RWBY for not killing one of the three dark skinned characters, or just murdering the Ace Ops as a whole. What the story is going to do with them though, who knows.

Jaune and Nora have that ‘You can do it!’ moment after three of their friends have presumably been killed. I swear, about 80% of Jaune's scenes do not work tonally and oh boy, things only get worse from here.

First though, I like his entrance. He slams into the fight against Cinder and lines up with Penny and Weiss, who is still dual-wielding her and Blake's weapons. That's an epic shot.  

It looks as if they stand a decent chance against Cinder — Weiss' lost aura notwithstanding — except then Cinder's arm starts going crazy and she gleefully announces that Salem has returned.

Working on a time limit now, Cinder unleashes a volley of attacks that Penny steps in to protect the other two from. It's here that Cinder grabs hold with her grimm arm.

It's here that Penny dies. Again.

For the third time.

Friends, I am tired. This moment honestly deserves the most epic of rants, but that, in turn, requires energy. Energy? In this economy? Ha! That's hilarious. Taking this seriously though, the problem here can — as usual — be boiled down to a single question: What was the point?

Penny died in a horrible attack that shook the cast and audience both to their core.

That emotional impact was erased through her resurrection.

The resurrection did not create a new emotional impact for our heroes to grapple with.

Penny is given the Maiden powers, solidifying the fact that she's always been a "real girl."

That lesson was erased when the story decided to make her human for unexplained reasons (because no, she never needed to be human to survive the virus).

Penny then dies, passing the power to Winter... who was set to get the power in the first place.

We have, once again, come full circle. You can take Penny out of the story and nothing changes. Does Ruby lose any lessons or emotional growth? No. Does anyone survive who would have otherwise died? No. Does her getting the powers lead to someone unexpected snagging them upon her death? No. Penny's existence was filler. She was put in the story to take up time and, that done, was removed from the story once again. It's a choice that wouldn't be half as horrible if that filler hadn't done so much damage along the way.

First is the obvious: that Penny didn't deserve this. As a character, she didn't deserve to be brought back just to be killed off again, seemingly without narrative purpose, serving only to draw in viewers who RT knew loved the character. Second, keeping her in the story led to her entire arc unraveling. Initially, Penny died as an android in the world's eyes, but those who actually knew her — Ruby and Pietro — mourned the girl she really was. Now we have this horrible message that being a machine isn't real enough, so she has to die as a human being. It's a disservice to her character and, as an allegory for many minorities, downright insulting to the audience. Third, this offensive 'better to die as a human than live as a robot' message is wrapped up in the claim that Penny finally gets to choose something — “Let me choose this one thing. Trust me” — but she already did that when she chose to take the Maiden powers. We already had the better written version of this last volume!

And the fourth issue...well.  

Fourth and fifth are the real kickers. Fourth is that Penny's death was an assisted suicide. She explicitly asks Jaune to kill her so she can ensure she's thinking of the right person when she passes (never mind that her thoughts would probably be on Jaune while this is happening) and that's... pretty horrible. Look, I'm no purist. I like a great deal of dark, gritty stories whose plot exists to make us uncomfortable. That's a valuable emotion that fiction can generate. The problem is not that RWBY is tackling a sensitive topic, but that they aren’t tackling it well. Yes, they put in a content warning and (from what I've heard) a suicide helpline as well, but providing the already necessary resources is not the same thing as writing that kind of scene with respect and care. All of the above tells us that, no matter what RT may have intended, that respect and care weren't communicated to the audience. Like Yang, they didn't even bother to keep Penny's death within the rules of their world. Jaune is right there ready to heal her and Penny says no, there's supposedly not time.

Um... since when?

Jaune's aura boost is instantaneous. The second he amplifies aura is the same second the healing starts and their talk could have been spent saving Penny. There was certainly time to save Weiss in Volume 5. To have a character go, 'Nah, it's too late' when the solution is right there is the ultimate cop-out. Suddenly announcing that the solution will no longer work For Reasons is not a legitimate limitation and it's made doubly insulting that RT didn't simply use the limitations already available to them. Jaune has been running low on aura since the whale. He then expended a great deal of aura boosting Penny to keep the virus in check. Every other ally has had their aura broken in this fight so, there. That's your solution. Have Jaune take a few hard hits from Cinder, his aura breaks, and then when Penny is mortally wounded he no longer has a semblance to heal her. It's that easy! Yet instead they had Penny reject help so that she could ask to die. That's what's offensive here.

Finally, reason number five... why is this moment given to Jaune? That's another easy solution: Jaune has gone through the portal and can't get back to heal Penny. There. Done. But logistics aside, this scene should have gone to any other character. Who is Jaune to Penny? Or Penny to Jaune? No one! They don't have a relationship. I get that the writers didn't want any of the girls at her side because then it would be hard to justify Penny not passing the power to them (which I get: making one team member a Maiden changes the show drastically), but you know who should be there instead of Jaune?

Pietro.

Pietro, who built Penny as a weapon and who was never given the chance to apologize for that. Pietro, who told Ruby he could only rebuild her once more, setting up an expectation that he'd sacrifice himself for his daughter (despite the complicated racial issues that would bring up). Pietro, who watched Penny plummet and has no idea what happened to her, let alone that she's been made into a human girl. Pietro should have been at her side, saying goodbye to his child and helping her complete her last wish.

And it would be so very easy to pull off. All it takes is a single line where Penny remembers that her father exists, asking Ruby to ensure a portal opens up in Amity. There's a quick reunion along the pathways before Cinder attacks. We hear a cry of despair as Penny falls and she looks, seeing her father racing towards her, though she thought he'd already made it out. There, you’re done. We open ourselves up to a lot of attacks whenever we say, "Why didn't RWBY just do ____?" because those who vehemently defend the writing like to go, "Oh, you think you could write RWBY better?" and no, I don't. I struggle with long-form storytelling and massive casts. I don't think I could do justice to the sort of show RWBY wants to be, but I do think I'm a decent enough writer to spot when there are major problems like this. The question of "Why doesn't Penny remember that her beloved dad exists?" and "Why, out of that massive cast, is Jaune the one to do this deed?" are both things that a newbie writer can spot, and a sometimes okay writer can figure out how to fix them both simultaneously. A good writer will start thinking about themes — what might it mean for Pietro to kill the creation he made? — and a great writer will find a way to pull that off without having that insulting, discomforting feeling pop up. At this point, our RWBY crew feels less like new writers making mistakes (because they're not new, not at all), but rather just writers who haven't bothered to learn from their mistakes after eight years. That's a lot harder to watch.

Because putting Jaune here doesn't just mess with RWBY's internal rules (not using his semblance) and it's not just useless in terms of Penny's development (she doesn't know him outside of "dude who boosted my aura for an hour"), but it also falls back into a pattern I thought RWBY had finally broken from: making Jaune the story's emotional center. This is not the JAUNE show. It's the RWBY show. Yet here, once again, we have Jaune in the spotlight. Why, after a whole volume of Ruby avoiding making decisions, does Jaune finally make the hard call? Why, after a scene where Penny asked Ruby to kill her, does Jaune do that deed? Why, after a divisive arc where all the grief for Pyrrha went to Jaune, is Jaune now set to shoulder the grief of Penny? At least Jaune had a relationship with Pyrrha, even if Nora and Ren did too. Yet with Penny he seems to be there solely because the writers can't bear to keep him out of that center spot for long. All of Team JNOR make it through to Vacuo... except Jaune. Jaune falls into the abyss too because, if the show goes this route, we apparently can’t have a volume just about Team RWBY, the main characters. The main characters are separated from the rest of the team and it's Jaune, not Oscar and Ozpin with a connection to the lore, not Nora or Ren whose development now hinges on them learning who they are without the other, it's Jaune who follows the title characters into a new dimension. 

The issue is not whether Jaune deserves to grieve over the truly traumatic thing he just did now that he’s done it. He obviously does. The issue is the writers setting up a scenario where Jaune is situated to do that emotional work in the first place. 

I like Jaune as a character. I don't like how the writing uses him as a character. RWBY is built on the idea that these four girls are the heroes of this tale, not the expected blond, blue-eyed, sword wielding guy we’ve seen in so many other stories. So why does that guy get the most important scene of the finale? Yes, Jaune had much less screen time this volume than he did in the past, that’s a good thing given the number of important characters RWBY has to balance, but that hasn't erased the problem of him being given significant moments that should be going to title characters. Does Ruby’s team rescue Oscar and take on Salem? No, Jaune's team does. Does Ruby's team save Penny? No, Jaune's semblance keeps her grounded and then holds the virus off. Not everything is a problem — we've also got good choices like having Ruby defeat the Hound and Ruby's team take on Cinder for the majority of the fight — but that doesn't erase that Penny’s death wasn’t something Jaune should have been a part of. Not unless he was going to heal her. Doing better than they have in the past doesn't mean that RT isn't still slipping when it comes to giving him undeserved focus.

They took one of the most controversial characters, controversial because of how much emotional focus he's gotten in the past, and had him help a fan favorite commit suicide while he cried about it, showing more emotion for a near stranger than our title character showed for her sister. This is a character who, up until two or three episodes ago, had no connection to the victim and still has no reason to thematically be the one committing this act. That is why the fandom goes, “The crew loves Jaune and does everything they can to put him in the center of the action.” Ruby, as main character and Penny’s first friend, is the obvious choice here. Pietro, as Penny's father, would be a good choice too. Hell, Nora is a better option given their moment in the Schnee manor this volume. Or Winter given their moments in Volume 7! Have her escape Ironwood, find Penny, receive the powers, and then finish him off. Literally anyone would be better than Jaune, not because Jaune is a bad character, but because Jaune has no emotional stakes here and putting him in a position where he could heal Penny but doesn’t is massively stupid. No one should be surprised that a lot of the fandom is upset about this. It was one hell of a reach to give him this moment and, since Jaune's problem has always been getting too much screen time and emotional nuance compared to our main cast, it's no wonder this act brought up a lot of bad memories. RT fell back into an old pattern after two volumes of improvement and they did so at the worst possible time. 

The tl;dr is that Penny's third death is a writing travesty, just like her second. I shouldn't be surprised, given that this is the same volume that tortured a kid and the only thing they did with it was have him blindly trust his torturer... yet I find myself surprised nonetheless. Because Penny had such potential as an android Maiden and, as much as I personally hated it, potential as a former android learning to be human too. But why explore any of that when you can kill her off instead? Again.

As a final, far smaller note about this scene, we have the continuing problem of what purpose Cinder's arm is serving. If everyone recalls, its threat comes primarily from the fact that she can "siphon off" power from other Maidens.

She did it to Penny during the Amity battle and now she does it again, a great deal of green energy absorbed into Cinder. So what's left to give to Winter? Why doesn't Cinder become noticeably stronger with each successful theft? Like so much else in RWBY, we're told it exists without actually seeing the impact of that. Winter isn't a weaker Maiden for having lost power and Cinder isn't a stronger Maiden for having snagged it. It's just.. there, hanging out and looking vaguely menacing, I guess.

Outside of this unnatural not-transfer, we get to see how the power normally passes as Penny meets with Winter in some in-between place. It's a soft, heartfelt scene... with the exception that Winter says, “You were always the real Maiden at heart. I was just the machine. Just following orders."

I don't know how any viewer can doubt that RT now believes machinery = evil. Penny's machine body is magicked away so she can be a real-real girl. Yang announces that the arm she worked hard to make a part of herself is just "extra." The man with half a metal body is made this volume's villain and losing his second arm is, by the authors' own admission, a symbol of his lost humanity. Mercury with two metal legs remains a bad guy while Emerald and Hazel are hastily redeemed. Tyrian with his cybernetic tail is the most devoted crazy of the bunch. Maria, blind and in need of assistive lenses, is so forgotten by the story she was left in the tundra nine episode ago and won't be mentioned again until next volume (if then). Pietro, the guy in the wheelchair, is forgotten too, despite it being his daughter who dies on screen.

Now Winter, also bearing an assistive device, says that she's the real "machine" here and tells Penny, now human, that she was always the "real Maiden." I don't know what happened to make RT do a 180 lately, but the disability rep is no longer what it was.

Penny reassures Winter that she'll always be a part of her and then passes on, for good this time.

The rest of the episode feels lackluster, if I'm being honest. Images of Cinder beating Weiss are intercut with Ironwood beating Winter, getting her to a point where her aura breaks. 

But then the powers appear and, as we'd expect, she easily turns the tide. 

Gorgeous animation there. 

But RT once again rewrites earlier scenes by having Ironwood claim that the "destiny" he chose for Winter has finally arrived — isn't that Cinder's MO? — and Winter shoots back that he chose nothing, this was a "gift." Except, it was never about destiny or orders? This was why Weiss' anger in Volume 7 was ridiculous. She acted like Ironwood forced Winter to accept the powers and Winter told her point blank she chose this. Ironwood didn't decide anything, he offered and Winter chose... kind of like how Penny is choosing now. I hate how nearly all of Ironwood's character has been ignored or, during times like this, outright lied about to make him seem super duper evil. He tried to bomb a city! You don't need to make him seem evil anymore, that job is done! Like their sudden change regarding disability, RT now seems to be allergic to nuance. Heaven forbid Ironwood be allowed to have valid points like he did in Volume 3. No, if you've got an antagonist every single thing they've ever said must be twisted into a display of their evilness.

Unless you're Hazel, who Oscar trusts for #reasons. Unless you're Emerald, who the group immediately embraces. Unless you're Cinder, who gets to cry on a rooftop and secures the trust of her allies long enough to betray them again.

But Ironwood? Nah, screw that guy.

Salt aside, the fight is pretty boring. Winter literally just throws up a wall of ice and Ironwood's blast rebounds, taking him out.

Winter flies through the portal and we return to Jaune. His sword is broken by Cinder, so weapons should be quite the problem in Volume 9. 

There's a bit of sword vs. sword Maiden battling — this episode really pulled heavily from both Volume 3 and 5's finales — before Cinder gets smart again and attacks Weiss, currently trying to escape with Jaune. Weiss goes right off the edge and Winter isn't able to reach her in time. That's the entirety of Team RWBY, lost to the magical void.

Kudos to Winter's VA and the writing here though. This feels like an appropriate reaction to losing a sister. Screaming, sobbing, falling to her knees and beating the floor... Ruby, take notes.

A roar sounds through all the portals though, the sort of roar a pissed off witch might give. Jaune convinces Winter they need to leave Cinder behind, but before they can escape Cinder... makes a new wish?

Look, it works on all the major fronts. Cinder has the staff, check. We've basically established that Ambrosius can make an unlimited number of things per era, check. We know the previous thing disappears when a new wish is made, check. My only question is the timing. In all honesty, I'll have to re-watch the scene to be sure, but at the time it felt like the portals began disappearing almost the second Cinder left. Did she really have time to summon Ambrosius, deal with his explanatory nonsense, and get him to make a new wish without any fiddly concerns? Sure, fire is just fire, but it still felt like way too much happening too fast off screen.

Either way, the portals are gone and Winter makes it through in time, but Jaune does not. He falls through the void along with Team RWBY. And Neo.

Neo is the only addition I'm looking forward to here.

We get a few shots of our other characters as Winter arrives, saving the day by taking her grief out on the grimm. So glad something came of Ren breaking his aura again! Maybe they'll be more fighting at the beginning of Volume 9? If we see any of this group outside of 9's finale. My worst fear right now is that we'll spend an entire season away from the main action — remember how I said it would be stupid for Team RWBY to go on a side adventure while Salem is attacking the world? — and when they return there will have been some major time skip. Salem has destroyed most of Remnant, only pockets of survivors remain, it's all dark and dystopian... and oh look, every bit of character development happened off screen. How did Nora discover who she is without Ren? She did it while Team RWBY was gone. That merge we've been teasing for five years? That happened while you were gone too and, btw, Ozpin has ceased to exist. So sad, right? Not that anyone will actually mourn. Just take comfort in the fact that his last line was an "Oh no" about Ambrosius and his last major scene was apologizing for how the group treated him. Emerald's redemption? Off screen. Winter's grief? Off screen. Any and every one of these challenging beats to tackle can be waved away with, "We went through that arc while you were lost in the magical realm. Just get to know our new, improved selves now!"

Please, oh writing gods, don't let that happen.

Though I do worry because my last prediction came true.

But we all knew we’d end up here. My current theory? The portal should still be open at the vault. Winter will fight Ironwood, escape through it, and it will close right before he escapes too. He’ll fall with Atlas and everyone will act as if it’s some beautiful, poetic justice for him to perish with the city. 

Ironwood didn't make a break for the portal — too busy being unconscious — but we got everything else. Winter left him, he falls with Atlas, and this is some poetic justice, I guess. Really, it's just an undignified death. I'd hoped for a sympathetic kill, something that showed the characters still cared about him even if they knew Ironwood had to be stopped. Baring that, I'd hoped for an epic battle that took him out with style. Instead, no one even bothers to kill him. Ironwood is now beneath the entire cast, not even worth finishing off. Winter casually tosses his blast back at him and leaves. Cinder throws out a "that's checkmate" and leaves. I don't think Salem even looks at him. Ironwood (presumably) dies with no one and nothing, just a casualty of the city Team RWBY made fall. And I say "presumably" because the audience isn't even given the satisfaction of being sure he's passed on. Like Hazel, Ironwood's death is this weird, ambiguous moment that, based on the other character reactions, isn’t meant to be ambiguous. Is he dead? Most likely. Is it possible, based on what we've seen, that he'll pop up two volumes later like

Yes and, memes aside, that sucks. I don't want to be wondering for the next couple years if Ironwood survived and if they'll bring him back just to drag his character through the mud again. Move on.

But no, we don't even get that.

I've spoken at great deal about Ironwood both in these recaps and on my blog more generally. Last week, I said I'd covered it all and there was no need to rehash it all again. I stand by that, so let me just conclude this travesty with a final note: if your bad guy's final moment is using the last of his strength to point a gun at the actual villain of this story, and you don't realize the problem of how this image contrasts everything else the story has insisted about his character? … I just don't know what to do with that.

Oh, actually, final-final note: Ironwood’s semblance is officially a Schrodinger's semblance. It is both canonical and noncanonical simultaneously. Wooo. 

Cinder tells Salem she used her wish to "add more flames to the first of Atlas" and we cut to Watts, trapped in a roaring fire, unsuccessfully trying to break his way out. Wow, I hate that too! Next to Tyrian, Watts was our last remaining, entertaining villain. He carried a lot of the last two volumes and, I had hoped, was going to add some bright spots to the coming volumes as well. Apparently not.

Just another waste.

In addition to this casual, second murder of her ally, Cinder successfully convinces Salem that Neo killed Ruby and Ruby used the Lamp's last question, but she's back in her good graces since she snagged the Relics anyway. “You’ve done well, Cinder. Our work here is done" and they leave, blasting off like a less cool Team Rocket as Atlas plummets into Mantle.

Let's spend a second to tally things up then, shall we? What happens if Ruby, instead of throwing a moral fit, says, "You're right and we never should have lied to you, or betrayed you. But we want to help now. You get the Relics and the Maiden to safety in Atlas, if you can, we'll defend the people of Mantle"?

Well, they can still tell the world about Salem and call for help, much more easily now since Ironwood would likely just give them the code rather than them needing to spend an episode stealing it.

The Staff at least may not have ended up in Salem's hands and the group could have actually focused on getting the Lamp back (also solved if they'd been smart and just put it in the vault to begin with).

Mantle would still have been safe because Salem was never interested in Mantle to begin with.

Atlas wouldn't have fallen.

Ironwood wouldn't have died.

Penny wouldn't have died.

Even Vine wouldn't have died!

Our heroes unambiguously made the situation worse. Rather than banding together with their allies to fight the real enemy, Salem, they pushed until they made enemies of Ironwood and the Ace Ops both. Then they asked for help — which a pinch of logic said would never arrive — and twiddled their thumbs waiting for it. When it was clear none would come they...did nothing. They sat around, upset that the people were in danger, but not willing to do anything about it. It's only when one of their own, Penny, is threatened that they kick into high gear, hitting on a solution that they could have posed to Ironwood from the very start if no one liked the fly away plan. Yet instead of taking a few minutes to brainstorm other ideas — doing anything other than denouncing Ironwood to the rest of the group and attacking the Ace Ops — they spent two days sitting around, fixing minor messes they’d helped to create, then rushed through the portal plan, messing up the wish and stranding an entire kingdom in a sandstorm, with only Winter now to protect them from grimm.

Fantastically done, team. 

The villains won, yes, but not because the villains were smart and compelling. Watts' hack on Penny and the heat petered out to nothing and Salem... well, she sat around for the whole volume, expending energy only to torture Oscar and try to (unsuccessfully) stop some escapees. Neo and, miraculously, Cinder did the most damage, but only in the final hour, with this "damage" being that our characters fall into a void that we now know looks remarkably like a paradise! Everything bad that happened was a result of our heroes being stupid and stubborn. That's a compelling story to tell... but RT isn't trying to tell it. Our heroes caused so much damage, yet that damage goes unacknowledged — or worse, ignored into silence like with Ren — and everything else is waved away with the magic wand the series claims isn't there. The cold doesn't kill anyone. Oscar has no problems walking off the torture. Nora hops back out of bed. Ruby one-shots the Hound. The civilians lost to the void must have survived too. The entire kingdom successfully makes it to Vacuo... unless you count the massive army we never saw making use of the portals, but who cares about them, right?

The villains won, there was indeed something resembling consequences, but none of it was emotionally satisfying. Not even when the series tries so hard to insist that emotion is there.

Qrow watches Atlas fall, mouthing Ruby and Yang's names, but it's too little, too late. Where was this care for his nieces when he was obsessed with killing Ironwood? When did they care about him? Was it when Ruby shrugged at his arrest, when neither cared that he was missing, or when they were designing an escape plan that didn't include putting a portal where Qrow could reach? RWBY markets itself around the found family-ness of its cast, but they're done a poor job in recent volumes (not others) of convincing me that most of these characters care for one another. We went from Ruby denouncing all adults, to Ruby pulling an Ozpin with Ironwood, to Ruby watching blandly as her sister falls to her presumed death. This is my hero? This is the simple soul we're supposed to rally behind? Ruby doesn't feel like a character who cares about other people anymore and, given that she leads the charge, neither do most of her friends. Or, when that emotion appears, it's jarring and undeserved. Jaune cries over Penny's death? That's tonally and characteristically backwards.

This volume was the culmination of so many mistakes over the past two years. No, Covid couldn't have made things any easier for the crew — the fact that they got a volume out at all is amazing — but the pandemic isn't to blame for the problems in the story. These seeds have existed since Volume 5, with some (like Jaune) going back even farther. I don't think we're ever going to get that flawed, but emotionally fulfilling RWBY back. The show has dug too deep and unless it somehow manages to create a clean slate — those time travel ideas get more and more alluring! — there's nothing they can do but keep on digging. At this point, I can only hope that the series does wrap up within the next two volumes, rather than dragging RWBY to a Supernatural-esque length.

Our final shot of the episode proper feels fitting for what this volume has been. Atlas and Mantle flood rather than exploding, something that makes a certain amount of sense, sure, but definitely wasn't what I was expecting. And after all these shocking images — Penny dying, the grimm attacking, our main characters disappearing in a puff of gold dust — we end it all with bits of random debris. It's strange and underwhelming. Out of everything you could have done with the options you had, you choose to do this?

Of course, RWBY always has an after-credits scene (RIP Raven's, still amounting to nothing). Here, the sounds of water return to show us a beach. Crescent Rose imbedded in the sand, mirroring its classic pose in the snow.  

There's a tree. It's a very different kind of tree from what we saw in Volume 6, but the height and shape is nevertheless reminiscent of Light's domain.

A tree of life, anyone? After all, the group has fallen into a dimension created by a Relic, the gift of Light himself. It certainly seems as if RWBY is heading towards another encounter with the Gods, though what that will look like and how narratively satisfying it will be remains to be seen.

As for our bingo board, RWBY certainly pulled its weight! Only three squares got gold stars: Watts and Jacques didn't manage another team up because both are dead, Oscar didn't apologize for getting shot because he was too busy being tortured, and Qrow didn't drink likely because he didn't have access to any alcohol across the whole volume. Can't say that's a stellar result. The final image is something to behold though lol.

What a mess.

And on that less than exciting note... we’re done. This has been the volume of desertion, with a large number of fans telling me that they will no longer watch RWBY, but baring something entirely unexpected in my future, I'll be back next volume, for whatever that's worth. It never ceases to amaze me that even one person would give these nonsense recaps the time of day, so in all seriousness: thank you for reading. You rock.

Now go forth and fill the hiatus with great RWBY content!

✌️

[youuuimeanmee]

Eren Meta From 139

Many people believe chapter 139 butchered Eren's character because of this scene.

Because out of nowhere, Eren's motivation is to reach Mikasa's choice to satisfy Ymir's wish; thus, everything he said from the beginning about his motivation is all lies or meaningless.

No. And I'm no writing this to justify or condemn him. This post is more for myself, because I'm trying to understand his character.

Now let's see at his words. "All of it, was to arrive at that result. That's why I moved forward." What does he mean by it? Which actions?

This.

All the events, starting from ch 123-139, are going according to Ymir's wish.

Right after Eren told her to decide for herself.

She wants to end the world, at least 80% of it. She wants to push Eren's friends to stop him, even if they have to betray their nation. The Battle of Heaven and Earth, all of the clusterfucks in chapter 135-138 happens because it's Ymir's will to push Mikasa to make a choice. She chooses to end the titan curse after she gets to see what she wants.

Ymir did all of this, she watched all the events that unfold because Eren released her.

Then, what about Eren's will?

This is why I'm okay with the idea of Eren following Ymir; Eren doesn't have a reason to reject Ymir's wish because he got what he wants. He got the future he saw on the medal ceremony, the eradication of titans. He got the "freedom" to flatten the earth, and if his gamble paid off, he'd get his friends' safety; because they will become the world's savior after they stop him. It's a win-win situation, thus, putting him in a position where he becomes Ymir's ally and stands by her side.

The reason why Ymir chose Mikasa is not clear, but Eren had a hunch and it's something he could relate to; another reason for him to not object to Ymir's wish. It has something to do with that day when Mikasa practically confessed her love for him, the day where he could use the Founder's power for the first time. I leave this scene up to your interpretation.

What about Eren's will from before 123? What did he try so hard to achieve?

This scenery. Aside from the eradication of titans.

Here's the thing. Doesn't matter if fate favors you or not, you have to work hard to get what you want. To work hard, you need to know the reason. I take Isayama's artistic choice that the future memories he saw are fragments without context; he doesn't know why it happens the way it would. So, even if he saw the scenery, even if he saw the eradication of titans, why he has to go to hell first? Why he has to go through all of the suffering? Why he has to keep moving forward? He doesn't have to; but the world, destiny or whatever keeps feeding him reasons to move forward, until he reached a conclusion that the titan world is fucked up system and has been going for far too long. For Eren, this needs to end, and he wants to reach that scenery no matter what.

This is the man who saw how unforgiving the outside world is. The fact that a little girl got eaten by dogs just because she's an Eldia is proof that a subject of Ymir can never gain freedom, can never gain the privilege of human rights the way a normal human does. (I suggest you to read Gross' monologue from ch 87). The man saw how the world keeps pushing Paradis to be the source of evil without listening to what the other parties have to say. The man is manipulated to euthanize his own people as if Eldia doesn't deserve to be born. He saw the fucked up history of titans from 2000 years ago. He was so disappointed the world is not like in Armin's book, it's not like his ideal world. So he wants to wipe it away. He wants to bury the history and the civilization that created it, deep to the ground. He wants to destroy every last one of those animals, that's on this earth; titans or humans alike. He wants to leave the surface a blank plain. This is his ideal world, his freedom.

Eren said it himself. Even if he didn't know that his friends would stop him; even if it's not Ymir's will, he'd still trample the earth. To me, the reason why Eren commit genocide, the reason he said to Armin is no different than the reason he said to Zeke.

It's just the way he is ever since he was born.

A freedom seeker.

The wording is different with the receiver. With Zeke, it's different, because he's trying to make a point that this is who he is. But with Armin? He is going to die, with his best friend as his judge. He knew exactly why he wanted it: because he is free, ever since he was born. But somehow he couldn't say it outright with confidence. Maybe he's afraid to be judged as a monster by the person closest to him, or maybe he started to question his definition of freedom. Because to me, his eyes look like wonders.

Now. What is freedom? Many people believe that any acts out of violence is not freedom. But to Eren, that is freedom, his freedom. There's a meta that perfectly explains Eren's version of freedom, up until he did the rumbling. This is my highlight from that meta:

So freedom is the power of the individual to do as one wants. When you do something, you are imposing your internal desires onto the external world. If freedom is thus the power to impose your individual Will onto the outside world, then whoever has more power has more freedom.

This concept was highlighted when he told his friends in Paths that he's free to destroy the world and they're free to defend it; meaning that they're bound to clash, and they have to fight.

Freedom is not good. Nor is it bad. It is a force beyond good and evil, and that is precisely why it is terrifying. This, I believe, is why so many baulk at the idea that such a ruthless manipulator could be the avatar of freedom in this story. What I have always loved about SNK is how it delves ever deeper into its themes as the story goes on and discovers such fundamental paradoxes that your understanding of the idea is changed forever. If this is the horrifying face of freedom, perhaps we should not be free.

I don't know how much Isayama's involvement in this, but Grisha's commentary from the Lost Girls captures this concept perfectly.

For Eren, that "great power" is his own concept of freedom: A world without oppression. Doing what you want to do. He's free to protect his homeland by whatever necessary, whatever cost, and leave the rest of the world as an open plain.

Usually, the more we're obsessed with something, the more we stray from our humanity. After witnessing firsthand the vision-he-so-called-freedom, he doesn't know how to feel. He gets what he wants, but he's not happy at all, only the hollow scenery remains.

Eren realized how messed up he is, even before he did this. He tried to reach out to Mikasa that night after he saved Ramzi, to save his humanity left. It's one of the reasons why he asked her, "what is he to her?" Surely if he was loved –even after he killed those men when he saved her that day– would mean he's still human, right? And by running away with her, he could live in peace, maybe he could free himself from his obsession. But he's doing it so half-heartedly, that when everyone interrupted them, he just... let it go. He didn't bother to sneak with her or anything. He couldn't let go of the future he saw, he's losing himself to his desire/inner demon, to his obsession of freedom. Or maybe he's winning over his pathetic self so he could focus on what he needs to do? One could interpret this scene as Eren trying to break free from his obsession for "freedom." One could interpret this scene as Eren trying to break free from the shackles of his conscience. It's up to you.

Eren's outburst over Mikasa in this chapter is his pent-up feeling over her. It is, but after I write this meta, maybe it's more than that. It's because she's the proof of his humanity left. Many, many times, Mikasa is there to stop him from ruining himself. Mikasa's love creates a subconscious understanding that she will always be there for him. That's a part of her that he loves, and by feeling love, it means his humanity still exists. If Mikasa chooses to move on with another man, it means she will forget all the times they had together, she will forget the most human side of him. The only person who loves him as who he is, his home, would be lost. He would be lost. That idea scares him, even though he knows he doesn't deserve her love after everything he has done.

One more thing; another reason why Eren doesn't mind to be stopped, aside from Ymir's wish will get him what he wants –as I already explained. People argue that the conflict won't end until Paradis or the rest of the world remains; thus, Eren's half-hearted genocide is meaningless. No. No matter how angry he is that he wants to eradicate everything, he has enough maturity to understand, even back from the Battle of Trost, that humanity is far from united even if they're faced against a threat beyond human understanding. During the after-party night before the Battle of Shiganshina, he accepts that great power comes from joining ourselves together. We all need to find our own roles. Humans are created differently, because of times like this. By sparing the rest of the world, it keeps both Paradis and the world from collapsing. By keeping the diversity of people, someday it will open a path for peace because it's a part of human nature to try to understand each other; he learned it from the SC. Eren believes Armin could take him there, after he died. Maybe he forgot all of that because he's too caught up in his hate and anger up until 122, the same way he forgot back in the days.

Even if it's not explicitly explained in this chapter, I'd like to think that Eren got plenty of time to reflect on this matter when he did the Rumbling, to fill the emptiness he felt after he reached what he wants wanted.

Eren wins in the end, but at what cost? This chapter is calling out his tyrannical mindset, and it's great to see him realized his error, even if it's too late for him to go back.

Maybe this is what Isayama decided to focus on the last chapter, even if it's rushed. Maybe he (or his editor, idk) wanted the ending to focus on the protagonist's story about humans vs titans. The way Eren is so determined to wipe it out from this world, no matter how messed up his method, no matter how much he suffers, it doesn't matter if it's predestined or not. Because "freedom" is what he seeks ever since he was born. Because Eldia, every person deserves to be born in this world. Yes, every person, including everyone he killed. He knew the gravity of his action and choose to accept his death. Maybe it's the reason why Isayama doesn't delve into the aftermath of genocide further.

He wants the ending to be about Eren Yeager, The Attack Titan's journey about Attack. On. Titan.

[scarletarosa]

The War in Heaven and the False God

Most people have heard the legend of the Biblical War in Heaven of Lucifer and his angels against God. Though when young, I had always felt that the story was kept suspiciously short and lacked much sense. We are told of the angels not possessing much free-will, but also how could these divine beings suddenly just turn evil, as we are told? Due to these suspicions that there was more to the story than was told (as it is often said “the victors get to write history”), I decided to connect with Lucifer and other demons in order to learn from their perspective. This gradually led me to become a Luciferian and be told the full story of the War in Heaven.

The supreme deity is not Jehovah; he is neither all-powerful, all-wise, or benevolent. The supreme deity is the Source, the formless consciousness that has existed before all things and created the first gods of this Universe (the first among them being Lucifer). Though in order to create, the Source had to create from themself their female counterpart, the Queen of Heaven (who is formless as well). These two energies together create harmony and allow creation to come into being. The Source and Queen of Heaven have both been known throughout many different cultures under different names. For instance, the Source has been known as Atum in Egypt, Brahman in India, Olodumare in Yoruba, etc. The Queen of Heaven has been known as Adi Parashakti in India.

At the beginning, the Cosmic Egg was formed in the Void with the assistance of elder deities. When the egg broke open, the gods Eros and Lucifer emerged from it- Eros being love and Lucifer being light. Though they were meant to exist separately; Eros remained within the Void and Lucifer dwelled alone within the Universe for many ages until the other gods were created by the Source. Among these first gods were the Angels Mikael, Raphael, Uriel, and others. Lilith was created last among them as the embodiment of the Queen of Heaven (a smaller and less-powerful copy of Herself in order to act within the Universe and marry Lucifer). With these first deities, Lucifer the First-Born became their leader and assisted in the creation of other spiritual races. Overtime, more gods were created by both the Source and through sexual union between the elder deities.

It was during the early stages of the Earth when the aeonic god Jehovah came. The aeonic gods are extremely powerful deities who are tasked with co-creating the material and metaphysical Universe; they are normally peaceful, but for some reason, Jehovah came seeking even more power. His goal was to usurp the Throne of the Universe and take command of an entire planet, which ended up being Earth due to a specific species that was being created here: humans. The humans were a younger race and felt insecure about their lack of magickal prowess compared to the other species on Earth like the elves; this caused them to become deeply envious and greedy as a race. Jehovah had destroyed the ecosystem of several different planets on his way to Earth, causing life to be destroyed on them. As he arrived to Earth to claim it, Lucifer led a revolt against him and was followed by millions of deities and other entities. This battle was terrible for everyone since Jehovah’s great powers allowed him to be able to drain energy from spirits or even kill them at will. Countless entities lost their lives trying to destroy Jehovah, but to no avail. The arch-dragoness goddess, Tiamat, who had created Earth’s lifeforms in the sea, even gave her life to help empower Gaia against the tyrant god.  

When many spirits were destroyed and the survivors were crippled, Jehovah took them and threw them into the nightmarish land of torment called Hell. This is the realm that is far away from the Source’s divine light. Due to this, the deities and other beings who were sent here had their essence transformed by this horrible realm; causing them to become dark and more intense in appearance and presence. Their wings became black and they grew horns; some developed red eyes, spikes, claws, or other monstrous features. Though overall, they remained beautiful, only in a darker way. They became known as “demons”, now restricted from the heavens by Jehovah, who had now claimed the Throne. The demons were in great pain and suffering, as they had all lost family and friends in the battle, as well as their divine homeland. However, they had not lost their drive to destroy the tyrant who had taken everything from them. The three most powerful demons became High Kings of Hell and created their kingdoms where their people could live and train to continue the great War. These High Kings of Hell are Lucifer (the most powerful and wise), Satan, and Leviathan. Though these mighty rebels were soon falsely accused of being evil and representing things that were actually opposite of them (Lucifer being lies when he is truth, Lilith being infertility when she is life/motherhood, Beelzebub being gluttony when he is health, Mammon being greed when he is generosity, etc).  

Overtime, Jehovah was able to win humans over to his side by pretending to be the Source and manipulating them to believe that they were special if they followed him. Little did the humans know that their sins in life would never be forgiven, as Jehovah did not care for what they would end up facing in the Underworld or in Hell. It is also no surprise that the main people who forwarded monotheism were war-lords; all seeking power and dominion over others (see Emperor Constantine, Mohammad, and the ancient Jews who dismantled Canaan and killed the pagans there). With these new religions that inspired hate and fear towards other religions, blind faith towards scripture, and hatred towards any spirits that aren’t “holy”, the world gradually became swallowed by the tyrant’s influence. Pagans were massacred en-masse and their temples, holy sites, stories, statues, cultures, and more were all destroyed. Churches and mosques were built on top of sacred temple sites of polytheists and they were faced with the choice of either dying or converting. And with that, the entire world changed and became a shadow of its former glory.  

Yet all of this was allowed to occur by the Source since existence has always revolved around evolution, and no evolution can exist within perfection. In order to allow wisdom and other attributes to develop, as well as to teach important lessons, all beings are allowed to endure suffering. This suffering, if overcome, holds the key to rising to greater potentials. And so Jehovah was not immediately struck down, but was constantly faced with other forms of justice from not only the gods of vengeance, but also from receiving loads of karmic debt.

Back in the ancient times when other races still roamed this planet, such as the elves, giants, scorpion-men, nagas, and dragons, we had magick here in the physical. When magick was performed, it was actually able to be seen and even deities were able to manifest in the physical with ease. Though in order to keep humans blind, Jehovah destroyed the magickal nodes that surrounded the Earth and ordered his humans to destroy the sacred sites that helped channel magick. Then the other targets were the races of Earth that were not human, since they were less malleable to his will due to their advanced wisdom. The humans were already greedy and envious, so they were easily encouraged to wage war against any race that was different from them. The elves were brutally slaughtered, raped, and enslaved until they all died out; the same happened to many other species. When the humans began killing the dragons and sphinxes, who acted as wise mentors and guardians of the Earth, these mighty beings decided to leave the humans behind to fend for themselves for the rest of their existence. And still in hatred, the humans decided to record the dragons as if they were greedy and savage.  

Overtime, everything was set in place for Jehovah, but the demons and other entities continued to fiercely fight against him over the ages, and they still do. The tyrant god has never cared for any human who has followed him, as he seeks only power and destruction of other deities. He takes the credit for the miracles other deities perform for worthy humans, allowing such people to assume what they want about him. The gods who he killed do not die forever though, as spiritual death is different. But it often takes decades, hundreds of years, or in some cases, a million years, in order for them to reform. Yet, to most humans, the other gods are nothing more than legend now. They watch over the Earth still, helping anyone who seeks them and fighting to make the world how it was back during the Golden Age. Though it will never be the same after all the ages of terrible destruction and death. Even the soul of our planet, Gaia, has been asleep for many years due to the trauma of losing so many of her children.

For those who would argue that the demons could simply just be lying to me about these events, it does not explain why they have helped me to better myself or how they have protected my loved ones in times of need. They ask nothing of me but to evolve as a person and to show open-mindedness towards their harsh history. I do not hold hatred or bias towards those involved in monotheistic religions (unless they act oppressive), I only have hatred towards the religions themselves and their toxic teachings. As well as the hypocrisy of how they destroyed so many cultures and people, all while incorporating their mythology into their own scriptures.  

If we want to learn the truth, we first must question everything we already believe in and then speak to the spirits, as they know far more than we ever will. You can ask any deity you like and they will all say that they hate Jehovah, for he has pulled the veil of ignorance over this world in order to consume it. For anyone who truly seeks answers, keep this account by the demons in mind and ask any gods you want about the truth. Each deity and demon I spoke to said the same, and all had lost family due to this traumatic War against the tyrant god. These religions save no-one, we must take accountability and strive to become better without begging for forgiveness all the time and expecting mercy to be handed out just for bowing down to a god who kills those who defy him. All scriptures of monotheism are nothing but books of manipulation and holier-than-thou mentality; this creates corruption and false spirituality in the end.

The Angels

[thedevilsmemes]

      PINTEREST QUOTES I USE IN MY MUSINGS BOARDS                         ~ A SENTENCE MEME - PART 2

                         Change pronouns as / when needed to preferred pronoun.

“I do not do justice, I do damage. I do not do empathy, I do damage. I do not do forgiveness, I do damage. I do not do mercy, I do damage.”

“Like, you can boss me around in sexual situations but you better not try to tell me what to do in regular life.”

“I’m fine, I’ve had worse.”

“I’m meaner than my demons.”

“If I cannot bend Heaven, I will raise Hell.”

“Well, aren’t you a little ray of pitch black?”

“He was like a storm.”

“You want to play dirty? Fine, let’s play dirty!”

{ feels an emotion. } “Who the fuck authorised this?!”

“What the fuck? What the fuck is this? What the fuck?”

“Judge if you want. We are all going to die. I intend to deserve it.”

“Goddamn right you should be scared of me.”

“They wanted a monster; I decided to give them one.”

“Seduce and destroy.”

“What the fuck is intimacy? How does that work? Letting… people be close to you? What the fuck?”

“You couldn’t kill me if you tried for one hundred years.”

“I’ll do this my way.”

“I am severely emotionally unstable.”

“What, from the bottom of the heart, the fuck?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t take any orders. I barely take suggestions.”

“I send my best regards from Hell.”

“I like my coffee how I like myself: Dark, bitter and too hot for you.”

“Me and God, we don’t get along.”

“Be brave, Angel.”

“Self care is drinking three pots of coffee and getting into a knife fight with God.”

{ takes gulp of vodka straight from the bottle } “My day was fine.”

“Have I stabbed you? No. Then I am being nice.”

“Holy Shit! I’M the demon living in my house.”

“Sir, that’s my emotional support knife collection.”

“I want an ancient elaborate dagger with my name engraved into the blade as a gift. The only romantic gesture.”

“ ‘Are you a top or a bottom?’ I'm a threat!”

“Stop being so defensive! I’m just trying to hit you with weapons.”

“The more knives you have the more valid you are.”

“She’s strong but she’s exhausted.”

“She loves moonlight and rainstorms and so many other things that have soul.”

“My darling, you can’t see it can you? How like the moon you are. Both of you so timid in yourselves; hiding pieces from the world. Then, there are those rare moments when you are both full, and it becomes hard to look away. You are beautiful.”

“Calm her chaos but never silence her storm.”

“She wears strength and darkness equally well. That girl has always been half Goddess, half Hell.”

“She has been through Hell, so believe me when I say, fear her when she looks into the fire and smiles.”

“She’s proof that you can walk through Hell and still be an angel.”

“She is both hellfire and holy water. And the flavour you taste depends on how you treat her.”

“Even the mountains can not hold all you have been carrying.”

“Storm with skin.”

“She’s thunderstorms”

“Kindness is a language that the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”

“Sometimes it takes only one act of kindness and caring to change a person’s life.”

“You have a heart of gold.”

“Butterflies are the Heaven-sent kisses of an angel.”

“She who is brave is free.”

“Clever as the Devil and twice as pretty.”

“Shut up. I wear heels bigger than your dick.”

“Girls who run in heels should be feared.”

“Family is everything to me.”

“She’s an old soul that believes in chivalry, romance, and love.”

“I hate getting flashbacks from things I don’t want to remember.”

“I run on coffee and grace.”

“I’m glad I’ve got boobs… the last thing I need is people making eye contact with me.”

“Tell me to put on my big girl panties one more time… and I’ll take off my thong and strangle you with it!”

“Please read all my posts in a sarcastic tone. You know, for full effect.”

“I have one nerve left and you’re dry-humping it, go away.”

“If I offend you, cry me a river. I’ll bring snacks and a raft. I will literally float down your tears, eating chips and working on my tan.”

“When she is happy, she can’t stop talking. When she is sad, she doesn’t say a word.”

“Music becomes my best friend when nobody else understands me.”

“Act like a lady, think like a boss.”

“I know I have friends but I feel I have no one to talk to about the shit that goes on in my head.”

“She was special. She combined a mean angel and a kind devil.”

“So much pain for someone so young.”

“She’s one of a kind.”

“Red lips and wine sips.”

“Brave girl, it’s time to love again.”

“She is intelligent.”

“Sometimes, when I say ‘I’m okay.’ I want someone to look me in the eyes, hug me tight, and say, ‘I know you’re not.’ ”

“Because I’m not the kind of girl guys fall in love with.”

“I fear I will spend my life, waiting for a love story that doesn’t exist.”

“You’re a woman, use it; bring every man you meet to his motherfucking knees.”

“She denies it but, the truth is, she’s falling in love with him.”

“Hearing your heels click on the floor sounds like power.”

“She loves deeply, regardless of the love she gets back in return and it’s both her biggest strength and biggest weakness…”

“Experience raised her. Hurt taught her. Neither defined her.”

“She was not fragile like a flower was, she was fragile like a bomb.”

“Life is short; make every hair flip count.”

“I’ve always been someone who looks ‘too deep’ into something or someone. That’s because I realised from a young age that there’s always more than what meets the eye.”

“If I say ‘first of all’ Run away because I have prepared research, data, charts, and will destroy you.”

“Underestimate me, that’ll be fun.”

“You think I’m sarcastic? You should hear what I don’t say!”

“She’s a combination of sensitive and savage.”

“Stay classy, sassy and a bit bad assy.”

“She’s battling things her smile will never tell you about.”

 “Ain't you ever seen a princess be a bad bitch?”

“I was told I was dangerous… I asked why? They said ‘because you don’t need anyone.’ That’s when I smiled.”

“She’s been through hell and came out an angel. You didn’t break her darling, you don’t own that kind of power.”

“Watch me. I will go to my own sun and, if I am burned by the flames, I will fly on scorched wings.”

“Her messy hair is a visible attribute to her stubborn spirit. As she shakes it free, she smiles, knowing wild is her favourite colour.”

“She’s strong. But in the back of her mind she doesn’t think that she was meant to be this strong for this long. And she wonders if there is a man out there, somewhere, who understands this.”

“She’s not for everyone and she knows it. People find her different and strange. She dances in the rain, she laughs when she cries and loves through her pain. People fear the unknown and they never knew a girl like her.”

“Don’t tell a girl with fire in her veins and hurricane bones what she should and shouldn’t do. In the blink of an eye, she will shatter that ridiculous cage you attempt to build around her beautiful bohemian spirit.”

“You provoke her until she roars and then get upset at her for becoming the monster you created.”

“Rip out his ego with your fresh nails.”

“She isn’t the sunrise; she’s the fucking sun.”

“You can’t touch a woman who can wear pain like the grandest of diamonds around her neck.”

“Watch your tongue around her. She will bear her fangs and tear you apart with all the grace of a Queen.” 

“If you won’t embrace her madness, then you’ll never taste her magic.”

“Beauty may be dangerous but intelligence is lethal.”

“She is water. Powerful enough to drown you, soft enough to cleanse you, deep enough to save you.”

“Heavy is the crown and yet she wears it as if it were a feather. There is strength in her heart, determination in her eyes and the will to survive resides within her soul.”

“I wish that I could say that I am a light that never goes out, but I flicker from time to time.”

“Spoil me with loyalty. I can finance myself.”

“Shoutout to all the people with brown hair and brown eyes! We basic as fuck but we cute!”

“I feel a nap coming on.”

“Is horny an emotion?”

“I just really like thigh-highs.”

“Even though she looks innocent, she is really a perverted demon.”

“She didn’t sob or wail. Her pain was horribly discreet but as persistent and almost as silent as bleeding from an unstitched wound.”

“I don’t rise from the ashes, I make them. I’m the whole fucking fire.”

“Beautiful but destructive.”

“I’m aiming for the ‘she’s a badass and cute as hell but I wouldn’t touch her without asking’ look.”

“Loving me must be so fucking hard and I’m so sorry.”

“Some women are lost in the fire. Some women are built from it.”

“You glow differently when you’re actually happy.”

“She’s magic, that one.”

“Kicked out of Hell.”

“Red hair: the crown you never take off.”

“You’ve got a fire inside.”

“She doesn’t need a warrior, she is one. What she needs is a devout heart, and strong arms to hold her after her battles are won.”

“You are the love that came without warning: You had my heart before I could say no.”

“You want battle? I’ll give you war.”

“True evil is, above all things, seductive.”

“The Devil’s got nothing on me, my friend.”

“Haven’t I fallen far enough?”

“I’m not like them, but I can pretend.”

“I don’t like being told what to do.”

“Now I grow wings and rage, and learn how to kill.”

“Life is tough, my darling, but so are you.”

“Though she be little, she be fierce.”

“I know what this is; It’s just myself, talking to myself, about myself.”

“You underestimate my power.”

[dotthings]

So here’s my thoughts on an alternate ending plan for S15. While the remade heaven was something that fit, very little else did, and if they were aiming for self-actualizations being fulfilled the ending didn’t convey that. It feels incomplete to me (I have posted enough analyzing why and that’s all I’ll say here). This is a more earth-bound take. An ending where all of TFW 2.0 defeat Chuck and are together and figuring out life free of Chuck’s maze. This also incorporates some of my previous meta spec that didn’t get addressed at all in the finale but things are left so ambiguous, I have no reason to think my spec can’t be canon now. Also I think if canon can screw things up this royally, then I’m allowed to state that my version is not only kinder, but makes more sense. I’m sure there is some loose end I’ve missed, and I’d want to have all the Wayward Sisters appear too. Gosh, endings are hard!

Envisioning this as one extra long episode. To be extra subversive I’m still using the start of ep 19, but mostly this diverges after the end of ep 18.

-the phone call from Cas in ep 19 isn’t a troll from Lucifer (Lucifer can stay trapped in The Empty for all eternity). It’s actually Cas.

Here’s what happened: The Empty took him, fulfilling Cas Jungian arc about confronting his shadow and instead of fighting it, accepting it as part of himself. Inside Cas, a soul has been growing for many seasons now. Spontaneous soul combustion. It started small and kept growing. The act of confessing his love to Dean was the final spark to complete the growth. As The Empty drags Cas away, Cas’s grace merges with his soul and the grace is the power jolt it needs to make his soul blaze to full life. His grace is effectively gone, burned out in the act of bring his soul into being. The Empty cannot hold him, his soul is pure, and he’s not filled with self-loathing. The Empty spits Cas out in Lawrence, KS because that’s where Cas’s soul home beaconed to. Effectively human, this process was fairly traumatizing to his body, so he’s weakened. He staggers across town to outside the bunker, calls Dean, and collapses. Dean (as we saw in ep 19) races up the stairs and reaches Cas first, but Sam isn’t far behind, and both boys help Cas down into the bunker. Dean, being Dean, can’t stop touching Cas. There’s some awkwardness after Cas’s confession but they aren’t going to talk about it yet. Dean’s just relieved to have Cas back

-Jack’s also overjoyed Cas is back. Cas explains to the fam what happened and that he has a soul now. This will change the dynamics of TFW interact, changes Cas’s demeanor slightly, and how Dean and Cas interact, but Cas’s personality is basically the same

-Michael sides with TFW. His decision to stand up to his father is sincere. There are Cas and Michael scenes where they start reaching some kind of understanding of each other’s pov

-There is a further scene showing Sam mourning the snapped Eileen, as he finds something that belongs to her in his room

-They hatch a plan to confront Chuck. Cas assumes he’ll be joining them but Dean balks because Cas is freshly human and not battle-ready. “You and Sam are human, and you’re going into battle” Cas argues. Dean’s not really being logical about this, so Dean and Cas bicker while Sam, Jack and Michael have to go guys? Guys? Evil god to stop? World to save? “Get a room,” Sam snaps.

-Dean wins the argument, mostly because Cas has to give in just so they don’t stay derailed. They proceed with Cas holding down the fort at the bunker in case they need a further spell or information from the MoL archives

-They confront Chuck at the beach. Following some parts of ep 19, Chuck starts pettily beating up Sam and Dean, who refuse to give up. Sam and Dean shoulder to shoulder, laughing at their enemy through their bloodied faces. (That was a good moment, I’ll keep that) Michael intervenes, Chuck tries to destroy him but Jack steps in. Chuck is fending both of them off for the moment. Kind of looks like Chuck might overpower all of them. He raises his fingers to snap them all away

and a familiar voice yells HEY ASSBUT. Cas hurls a magical molotov cocktail at Chuck. Because Cas he found a spell, and while the thing certainly won’t kill God, it certainly makes for a great distraction. Chuck’s body burns for a moment, and then the flames go out with Chuck unharmed. The distraction allows Michael to get the upper hand enough for Jack to grab Chuck and absorb his powers and render Chuck powerless. They all leave Chuck on the beach.

-Michael looks deeply amused by the cocktail. “At least you didn’t hurl it at me this time”

-unsnapped Adam switches in.

-Sam and Dean look beat to hell. Cas says something sad about how at one point he could have healed them with a touch but he can’t now and Sam and Dean reassure him it’s fine. Cas asks Jack to heal them and Jack says he’s going non-intervention God and yeets. Sam, Dean, and Cas seem taken aback by this move and their son vanishing into thin air

-Michael switches back in and offers to heal them but Sam and Dean refuse again. Cas rolls his eyes. Typical Winchesters.

-Sam calls Eileen. “Eileen, are you okay?” All is well. Dean checks on Jody and the girls. They’re fine. Everyone unsnapped.

-Adam switches in again to say goodbye but maybe see you soon, shakes hands with Sam and Dean. A promise of maybe someday they could figure out how to be family. “Where you headed to now?” Dean asks. “Around, I guess,” says Adam, and then Michael switches back in and says “the french fries on earth are worth hanging around for a bit” and Michael yeets out.

-They won. They’re free. Chuck’s defeated, Jack is going to be a new, uncorrupted God. But wait, there’s still half an hour left, what’s left to resolve? What else could there be?

-We get a montage. Sam and Dean continue to hunt, the bruises and cuts on their faces from the battle with Chuck fading. A scene of Dean giving Cas shooting pointers and Cas is a pretty decent shot but maybe he should hold the shotgun a bit higher. Dean sure does keep touching Cas a lot when it’s not necessary. They still haven’t talked. Sam doing laundry. Dean studying a job application at the desk in his room. The bruises and cuts from their fight with Chuck are almost gone. Eileen hanging out in the bunker, she and Sam doing research at the library table, laughing as Sam makes a joke.

-Sam, Dean, and Cas get wind of ghoul activity and set out on a hunt together. Dean and Cas are waiting together, leaning against the Impala, while Sam is inside a gas station getting them all snacks.

Dean: Are you okay with this? Human...forever?

Cas: I’m adjusting. Rather enjoy being able to taste the pb&j again.

*Awkward silence*

Dean: Cas—what you said—I—

Cas: It’s all right Dean. You don’t have to say anything. I told you, it’s not about the having, it’s—

Cas doesn’t get to finish the sentence because suddenly Dean’s holding his face in his hands and then leans in and kisses him.

Dean pulls back, staring right at Cas’s stunned pikachu face.

Dean: What makes you think you didn’t already have me?

They hold each other. Sometimes it’s not in the saying it’s in the actions.

Sam, who just emerged from the gas’n sip station, stands there holding packets of junk food and yells “FINALLY!” and Dean and Cas jump apart. Dean is beet-red but both Dean and Cas look happier, more peaceful than we’ve seen them look in a very long while.

-Standard hunt. They kill some ghouls, badass Team Free Will action scene. Cas gets taken off guard, but Sam has his back.

-Back at the bunker. Sam answers a text from Eileen—they’re meeting up next week.

-Sam, Dean, Cas are in the bunker having dinner when Jack randomly appears. Raises his hand. “Hello!” They’re all startled, but tell Jack they miss him. “You don’t write, you don’t call,” Dean complains. “Well,” Jack says. “I figured just because I’m non-interventionist doesn’t mean I can’t stop by for dinner once in a while.” “Darn right,” says Dean.

-TFW 2.0 have dinner together. Jack mentions he remade heaven, no more barriers. Released trapped souls like Kevin’s to heaven. New set of rules. Mentions he met with Rowena. They’re working out a better system. Reform.

“I would have gotten rid of the monsters,” Jack explains, “but can’t do it without upsetting the natural order of things—what’s done is done. The alternative is to reset everything. I won’t do that. Too much would be undone, too much good lost.” The implication is also: while he won’t intervene and be the God perching on Team Free Will’s shoulder, he also can’t bring himself to do anything that will undo them. “Sometimes it’s all worth putting up with a few monsters,” Sam says.

Jack vanishes again. “Guess we’ll get used to that eventually” says Dean.

-very last shot. It’s dusk, outside the bunker. Sam and Dean leaning on the Impala, watching fireflies, drinking beers. Not talking, just being.

Dean: We did it.

Sam: We did it.

Dean: Well, here’s to freedom.

They toast their beer bottles. Both look more peaceful than we have seem them look in a very long time.

Overhead shot of Sam and Dean, the Impala, the bunker.

*Kansas version of Carry On, Wayward Son plays*

[ckneal]

So, I’ve covered in an earlier post why I think Castiel was not particularly close to Michael and Lucifer in the time before Lucifer fell, and Chuck went and told everyone that it was Michael’s destiny to one day tear their evil brother limb from limb. Lucifer’s first interaction with Castiel in season 5 and Castiel’s one-on-one conversation with Michael in the bunker in season 15 both support this. 

But curiously enough, you know who I think may have actually been close to Michael, potentially, before Lucifer went bad, Chuck went away, and Michael turned himself into a monster to keep everyone in line? 

Uriel.

And I’ve already written a whole thing about how Michael twisted himself around in order to do what he thought was the right thing, through his demented lens, where I suggest that when Michael killed Anna, he was actually trying to scare Uriel back onto the straight and narrow, knowing that Uriel was questioning their father’s Plan, but what I’m getting at with my assertion that Michael may have been looking out for Uriel a bit more than the rest his siblings, is actually rooted in three instances across the series. 

They are as follows.

In season four, we are introduced to Uriel as a specialist, who, in the past, has “purified a city.” Supposedly, on God’s command. And there is certainly room to speculate that he’s referring to Sodom, where Lot and his family were chosen to be saved, but his wife looked back at the destruction and was turned to salt. 

Later, in season 11, Chuck makes his return to the series and reveals himself as God, which leads Dean to some very complicated feelings, because he has thoughts about Chuck, and thoughts about God, and the world, and he doesn’t really know how to say any of these things because he doesn’t want to “turn into a pillar of salt.” A sentiment that when shared, Chuck interrupts to specifically say “I didn’t do that.”

Chuck didn’t order Sodom’s destruction. Who did? You can make an argument for Michael. He was in charge after Chuck left, but--and just saying, personal interpretation--Michael’s not really a think-for-yourself type. And we don’t really know how extensive of instructions Chuck left Michael with, if any, but Chuck said he didn’t ask for this. And if Michael thought whatever was going on in the city was worth obliterating it, why didn’t he ever make that call again? Unless. . .well, we know Uriel did it. And we know how he feels towards humans. And hell, we know he wasn’t alone in feeling that way. Zachariah and Ishim are both shown to express similarly disparaging sentiments about humans over the course of the series. 

What if what we had here was a case of restless angels sitting around, shooting the shit, working each other up like, I don’t know, a bunch of adolescents from broken homes, who lacked the guidance of caring a parent, primed to act out with wanton destruction, not unlike what Lucifer, Amara, and AU Michael all dish out when they one by one hunted down specific individuals they thought Chuck would care about--but on a much less laser-focused scale. What I’m getting at is, what if Uriel, in the heat of the moment, talking about the unfairness of God seeming to prefer humans to angels, with some like minded individuals on sight to goad him along, took things too far, and destroyed a city. No warning, no set up, it just happened. Maybe Lot and his family were already on the road somewhere when it happened, or. . .

Heaven had a weapon capable of turning an angel’s vessel to salt. We see Balthazar use it on Raphael in season 6. And isn’t it interesting that, as the story goes, Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of that very mineral for disobeying orders by looking back at the city. But what if Lot’s wife wasn’t actually the one being punished for acting out? 

And I want to make sure emphasize this is just my personal headcanon, cooked up just for fun. I feel weird even nodding to an actual bible story since I usually try to look exclusively at the Supernatural canon, but. . .What if that particular story, in Supernatural, about a city that was so bad it had to go, where a woman was seen killed (or at least, the witnesses thought was killed, the witnesses being mere humans) and assumed to be another survivor fleeing for her life. . .was a cover up? Michael hints in season 15 that he had a hand in crafting the stories that eventually went into the bible. He knew about Sodom, his position in Heaven means that he definitely knew that Chuck didn’t order it, and the fact that Michael was known to take a very terrifying position when it came to siblings stepping out of line (see Anna here). . . I personally see some question marks hanging around this particular event. And I wonder if maybe it might have been an instance in which an older brother caught his younger one red handed doing something awful, his cohorts having run off, and recognized what had happened. And maybe made the mistake of thinking that he could just reframe it all and make all the negative aspects of the situation go away, not knowing that to those cohorts, it would look like he was condoning their actions, on the DL?   

I don’t know. It’s just a thought.

[themousefromfantasyland]

Aslan is not Jesus

At least, not the traditional one!

I really loved Narnia as a kid. As a kid raised in the church, the Christian undertones were ridiculously obvious and fitting for me. As a non-religious adult who had a bad falling out with the church, they just bring memories of a religion that my parents forced down my throat. Yet, I still miss Narnia and its magical mythological landscape.

I recently listened to an audiobook version of "The Last Battle", the last book in the series, the book in which Aslan destroys Narnia and let everyone faithful to him come to his country. C.S. Lewis treated his religious symbolism with as much subtlety as a train crash.

Although Aslan is basically Jesus in a alternative universe, and some religious groups love to praise the overly religious undertones, the Narnia depiction of Jesus is one who doesn't completely fit in in with teachings of mainstream Christianity, and if Lewis had used the character without any symbolism and allegory, I'm sure his Christian audience would not had defended the books the way they do.

Aslan walks with Pagan Gods

Narnia is filled with gods, and although they are very submissive to Aslan, they are very expressly told to be gods, the main example being the River Gods and Wood Gods, male counterparts of the Naiads and the Dryads respectively.

In Prince Caspian, Bacchus, the roman god of wine and his followers, the Maenads, appear, along with Silenus and his donkey. Aslan basically calls them in, and they serve the role of physical representations of the joy of old Narnia returning after the Telmarine domination.

Although the narrator expresses fear that they would be dangerous to the Pevensies without Aslan presence, Jesus presence, they pratically have a G-rated Bachanal, and lion!Jesus is one of the guests.

C.S. Lewis pratically glorifies the pagan gods and their rituals as animistic manifestations of the natural world, and they are as important to the well-being of Narnia as Aslan himself

This made the books the focus of the attack of more radical Christian groups who considered them heretical and blasphemous. Josh Hurst of the evangelical magazine Christianity Today, said that: "not only was Lewis hesitant to call his books Christian allegory, but the stories borrow just as much from pagan mythology as they do the Bible"

Nature is a very important, but overlooked, detail in the Narnia books. Both the Telmarines and the Calormenes are foreign enemies that tried to conquer Narnia, and both tried to take control and destroy its natural resources, making the Narnian gods angry.

In "Prince Caspian", one River God claims for Aslan to free him from the bridge that the Telmarines built upon his domain.

In The Last Battle, the Calormenes use a fake Aslan to trick the Narnians into cutting down the trees and selling them, killing the Dryads in the process.

This is due of Lewis hatred against the agnostic modernity, with all its mechanization and deprivation of nature, and his deeply childhood love of fantasy and mythology. He believed that even the pre-christian pagan times were being better than the modern world.

Colin Duriez, author of three books on C.S. Lewis, suggested that he believed that to reach a post-Christian culture one needed to employ pre-Christian ideas.

He argues that Lewis believed that pagan mythology could act as a preparation for Christianity, and that it was necessary first to turn people into good pagans, and then make them into Christians.

While traditional Christianity saw in the pagan gods and cults a worship of the Devil, Lewis was sympathetic to them.

Aslan isn't Worshipped like a God

In Narnia there aren't churches or temples to Aslan. They don't make sacrifices to him. The closest thing Narnia has to a organized religion, with temples, chants and sacrifices, is the Calormene cult of Tash, and he's basically this world's god of evil and is described as opposite to Aslan is every way.

Aslan, on the contrary, presents himself to the Narnians as a legendary king or a spiritual leader rather than as a god wanting worship.

Even in the last book, where Aslan effectively judges the Narnians, his judgment seems based more on morality than on direct servitude to him, since Emeth, a Calormene worshiper of Tash since childhood, is allowed in the Aslan Country, under the guise that since he used his faith to do good, he was worshipping Aslan all along.

"I take to me the services which thou hast done to Tash. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him."

Some christian scholars HATE this premise, since they believe faith in Jesus is the only reason a soul can reach Heaven. You can still be a follower of Jesus and end up in Hell, but following Jesus is the only way that a soul can reach Heaven in the end of the day.

Quick rant, I remember that when I was a kid, Jehovah Witness distributed flyers saying how faith in Jesus was more important than good actions in regards to reaching Heaven. I became so angry, thinking about all the good and selfless people who would be inhumanly tortured simply by not believing. I became much more angrier when I realized that in theory, by the Bible, that was true. One of the many reasons why I'm NOT A CHRISTIAN

The Magic Paradox

I'll be short, God HATES magic. There are thousands passages in the Bible saying how much God despises and loathes any religious ritual that isn't a direct worship of him.

It seems strange then how much his son is chill hanging out with creatures and entities that the early church would have considered as nothing more than demons, and using as his main source of power a spiritual energy that the church still hates to this day.

The church hates magic. Old testament God ordered expressly to kill anyone who is caught practicing it.

Yet, Aslan never condemns the use of the magic. Worse, magic is expressly said to be part of his and his father's nature, as in the Deep Magic, a set of laws placed into Narnia by the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea, Aslan's father, in the beginning of times.

In "The Magician's Nephew" is revealed that travels between worlds were once possible, and that the ancient Atlanteans knew about it, hitting about the possibility of magic and magic creatures in our world.

If magic existed in our world, Aslan as Jesus existed too.

Aslan is not the biblical Jesus, he's the "Real One"

That is the impression I have reading these books. By justposing his magical world full of Christian allegories to our world, C.S. Lewis creates a Aslan/Jesus that doesn't fit in with common biblical canon and that creates a lot of theological inconsistencies.

My personal theory is that as C.S. Lewis was a bigger fan of fairy tales, children stories and mythology, he created his own personal Jesus, a Jesus who fit perfectly with his mythological landscape and necessities, a Jesus that was closer to the mythical and adventurous gods, closer to his mortal followers and distant from the unfeeling and overly formal church.

Maybe that was one of the reasons why Aslan brought all those human children to Narnia, he wanted them to know who he really was, and not how the church presented him as.

[ldybluerse]

In Which Cuddles Happen...

Humans are, despite their disagreeing, social creatures. After all, Adam needed Eve for companionship, even though there were plenty of animals in Eden for him to befriend. One should be grateful that Adam did not attempt to know the animals in the Biblical sense as he came to know Eve.

This story is not about Adam and Eve though, it is not even about humans at all. There was really no need to mention them, except for the fact that a single Angel and a single Demon have spent the last six thousand years amongst humans, enjoying the silly little things that humans do. Silly little things that they also would get up to.

Perhaps it is because they have corporations like humans that they feel drawn to be more human like. Or perhaps it is because anyone would get lonely after six thousand years of watching human love, loss, happiness, and pain shared. Universal feelings that Crowley and Aziraphale could also understand despite not being, strictly speaking, human.

What the two Celestial beings had come to learn, but never attempt before, was that sometimes the cure for what ails you is a hug. For the bigger ails in life, a cuddle was the necessary prescription.

After the Apocalypse-That-Wasn’t and two failed executions, Aziraphale and Crowley were feeling good about how the events turned out. The world would continue on, Heaven and Hell would back off, at least for the time, and they came to a new Agreement; the only side that mattered was the side they stood on together.

Yet the euphoria of the moment couldn’t last forever. A day, maybe two at most. It at least lasted long enough to enjoy a wonderful meal at the Ritz and plenty of celebratory drinks back at Aziraphale’s book store. Worries crept back in as minds over-thought the things that minds overthink. Such things as whether or not Heaven and Hell will try again. Whether there is a Plan B or C or a whole alphabet of plans to end the world. Would they be enough to stand against the forces of Heaven and Hell truly working together to destroy Earth, and them?

All these thoughts where tying Crowley into knots. For a Demon, he worried a great deal about the consequences of his actions. A unique feature, perhaps it is an extension of his imagination; one must imagine consequences to worry that there will be some.

Aziraphale was just as worried as his Demonic counterpart. He was a guardian, a protector, and he did not know how he could do it alone, save for Crowley and some humans. Humans are wonderful, resourceful, creative, and deviant creatures! They could do so much and be great at doing it, but could they do enough to defeat Heaven and Hell? And what if that was the ineffable plan but they cocked it up?

Aziraphale couldn’t be sure anymore if he had Faith in the All Mighty, he certainly did not in Heaven. What was God doing? Creating all this life and telling them to love them then just deciding it’s okay to end it all? He would worry holes in his rugs from pacing if he kept trying to follow these logical rabbit holes.

If Crowley hadn’t caught his hand before he could make another round of pacing. The Demon has been lounging on couch in the bookstore; all long limbs and unable to sit up straight for longer then a few minutes.

The touch was a surprise and not unwelcome. Being on their Own Side seemed to involve more soft touches. And it had only been a few days! Six thousand years of keeping distance to avoid punishment was finally crashing at their feet as they were free to “fraternize”.

Oh, who was anyone kidding -which is no one, except maybe Heaven and Hell- they were free to be whoever they wanted to be.

Crowley tugged Aziraphale’s hand to encourage him to sit down on the couch. There was another reason for nerves and worries; what were they now?

Crowley raised one of his ginger brows high, “you going to keep sitting like a statue, Angel?”

“Well... I just don’t know! There is so much.... oh what are we going to do?!”

“I think... we shouldn’t do anything that has to do with Heaven and Hell.”

“Crowley, we have to figure out a plan. We were lucky that we made it through the first time. We can hardly hope our incompetence saves us a second time.”

“We can hardly plan anything because we don’t know where to begin to plan,” the lanky body of the Demon went from lax against the arm of the couch to being straighter. If not angled more towards Aziraphale’s sitting form.

“We could...” Aziraphale motioned with his hands as he couldn’t find the words. “Oh I don’t know!”

Crowley took the flailing hands into his own, “Angel, whatever comes up, we will figure it out. This is our home, and Our Side will protect our home.”

“But what about the plan?”

Crowley shot to his feet, his movement so fluid it was if he had no bones, “the Ineffable Plan? Well... I don’t care what God has planned. I don’t have to care! I only care about one thing!” Realizing where his words were headed, Crowley stumbled over them, “well, I mean two things. Earth. I care about Earth being here.” Somethings were too hard to say aloud yet.

“You were willing to go off to the stars. Leave it all behind.”

“Ngk... yes... but that’s because...” He dropped back to the couch besides Aziraphale. “I didn’t go so it doesn’t matter.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Crowley sighed, “we need alcohol.”

“Crowley. Why didn’t you leave?”

“You know damn well why I didn’t go. You’re the smart one.”

It was Aziraphale’s turn to reach out, he gently touched Crowley’s hand, “Maybe... I want to hear it. I may know, but without you telling me... well... then I can’t be sure.”

Crowley looked at Aziraphale, his signature glasses had been removed sometime ago when they entered the bookshop. He didn’t feel the need to wear them in the privacy of Aziraphale’s company. The Angel was looking at him in that way. That oh so soft way that says everything without a word uttered.

“It wasn’t worth going without you,” Crowley’s voice was barely above a whisper. “Earth isn’t worth saving without you...”

Aziraphale pulled him close, a simple hug. But simple hugs can be magical things, they can make the world and heal some of the wounds on a heart. Crowley and Aziraphale both needed hugs after everything they survived but telling two six-thousand-and-something-year-old Celestials they are touch-starved won’t get anyone far. It’s just something they have to figure out for themselves.

The hug lasted so long that it turned into a cuddle. Aziraphale leaning back in the corner of the couch, while Crowley draped over his chest and stomach. That need to be loved put their worries on the back burner. It was time to find a reprieve from their past and the worries of the future.

Sometimes the only cure for what ails a person is the act of full body cuddles. The type of cuddles where one person practically lays on another like a human weighted blanket. Now neither Aziraphale or Crowley are human, but they are human shaped. And there is nothing to say that Demons and Angels weren’t made in similar ways to humans; as social creatures. Of course Angels and Demons would be far too proud to admit they need contact from another being. They are too high and mighty or low and dangerous for that.

Aziraphale and Crowley are neither high and might or low and dangerous, they are in the middle, with humanity. Right there on Earth, in a crowded bookstore, in the arms of each other was where they belonged. It’s where they both finally eased their muscles and relaxed.

Crowley let his eyes close, he could nap right here for a century if he had a choice.

Quiet.

Yellow eyes flew open and he hardly dared to breath or move... there was a deep vibrating rumble coming from below him. He didn’t sense anything as he had with Satan. There was no great evil or anger anywhere nearby. And earthquakes certainly do not happen in England.

He stayed still listening. Waiting for something to happen, to figure out what was going on.

The rumbles stopped, “is anything the matter my dear? You have become stiff.” The Angel’s voice was soft, sleepy sounding.

“Is nothin’...” He forced himself to relax, but still on high alert. No one was getting his Angel this time.

The rumbling began shortly after Crowley relaxed again.

Wait.

The Demon adjusted his position a bit, his ear to Aziraphale’s chest. “Since when can Angels purr?”

———————

Note From Me: I dunno, my mind was like “purring is so soothing”, “OMG ANGELS SHOULD PURR BECAUSE ITS CALMING”.

I guess in headcanon Angels don’t know they can purr because they don’t exactly relax enough to do it. So it’s a surprise to everyone.

[vixxenfox]

Things I’ve noticed after watching the pilot over and over again

And things I just find amusing

- is it just a coincidence that when Charlie says “I wonder if it could be me” the center angel’s face lights up?

- not important but the “F*ck you heaven!!!” Sign is hilarious

- I hate Valentino with a burning passion, look at him texting Angel

- people drop from the sky to get to hell, more importantly without clothes which means each flippin person has to get specially made clothes for their weird demon bodies like sir pentious needs clothes to fit his snake body and stuff... idk just interesting

- the place beside the “we couldn’t come up with a catchy slogan but we sell hardcore drugs” building is called “begg slut”

- imagine dying, going to hell, and realize that you’re an egg

- egg #23 is the best

-one of the eggs like does a weird walk thing with their hand on sir pentious’ tail

-Cherri Bomb’s clothing is so asymmetrical and I love it like she is literally wearing a high-heel boot on one leg and like a tiny shoe on the other

- really just poor Tom he’s great

- Vaggie says “it’s all highlighted” but none of what we are shown is highlighted

- Also read the parts of the list we can see, it’s adorable

- “I don’t touch the gays” I find Katie great

- Jeffrey Dahmer obviously (Also the sticky note saying “who approved this show?)

- When Charlie scans the crowd another tv head just says ‘words’

-The person Vaggie punches isn’t in the crowd

- I love Razzle and Dazzle TvT

- Those two owl demons in Inside Every Demon is a Rainbow are most definitely references to Timber

- CHARLIE YOU JUST KILLED A PUPPY

- I love that there is a boo section

- Tom watches Angel Dust’s stuff confirmed

- I love the sonic spring noise when Angel launches an egg into the air

- Sir Pentious probably has a son that might be in hell so look out for another snake

- Do you see how happy Cherri Bomb is near Angel Dust, best friends! :D

- Aawww Angel pushes Cherri out of the way

- Angel didn’t just sprout a third set of arms, he also pulled an entire gun out of his body sooo... what’s with that

- I think you would just stop existing if you died in hell Angel

- That creepy fan has a body pillow of Angel

- Charlie takes off her pink... jacket(?) in one scene and the next she has it on again (you see her wearing pink in the closeup)

- Lilith is an absent mother

- There goes everyone’s fanon about how Lucifer acts (why couldn’t we get a nice stupid one T~T)

- I think they changed Alastor’s knock but I’m too lazy to check

- They fixed Alastor’s disappearing monocle

- I like that the mic has an eye sometimes it’s cool (how many “sentient-ish” things does Alastor’s have, first the shadow and now this)

- Alastor can teleport at least short distances and he appears as the shadow for a second

- They really make Alastor a very animated character and I love it

- (we knew this already but) Alastor clearly puts himself on a different level than the other sinners, he thinks of himself as justified and better (he doesn’t say “us sinners” he says “loathsome sinners” w/o him in the picture)

- Valentino, Rosie, Lilith (obviously), the girl from the porn studio, and the tv head dude (Vox, thanks @lavipsi) are all some of hell’s “strongest demons”

- TV head (Vox) is in the middle and top so he must be very powerful and behind him there’s also a green and red demon that reminds me of the wolf/fox demon from the bar scene

- Husk is very blocked out by Vaggie’s face but he’s clearly in the picture with Alastor (it looks like a fight but I don’t want to assume) like we know they know each other and stuff but it’s just weird that Husk is in the art when Vaggie says he’s “a dangerous Blahblah” and has entire speech of how dangerous he is

- I love the symbols that float up when Charlie isn’t looking and then the squeak as he turns to a more “innocent-like” Alastor when Charlie looks back

- Alastor rolls his eyes at Charlie when she says “No trickster, voodoo strings attached.”

- Talked about this before but the way his smile gets wider when Charlie says “for as long as you like”

- Why does Charlie have at least 2 posters about alcohol up if she didn’t want it in her hotel?

- I love how Niffty comes in and her bug-like noise when she appears

- You can see their reflection in Niffty’s eye during the closeup and Charlie is too adorable in it, Angel and Vaggie look ready to kick her out XD

- Everybody’s reactions to Niffty rambling on is beautiful, just watch them go from defensive to confused

- Alastor just following Niffty’s every movement as she zooms around

- Please tell me I’m not the only one who didn’t immediately see Husk as a cat? I honestly thought he was a dog for a while because he looks sort of like a Husky and his name is Husk, which got me thinking about the contradictions with Alastor not liking dogs... then I realized Husk was a cat.

- “are you sh!tt!ng me” “no I don’t think so” and “you think I’m just some clown” “..maybe” are some of my favorite lines

- Was I just supposed to know that on the bottom of Alastor’s boots (shoes? Hooves?) there were deer prints?

- So did Alastor really just teleport two sinners and basically copy part of the bar Husk was at and it’s just going to be there forever? Like you can see where the bar’s like territory ends because it’s walls are green while the hotel’s is red

- No like seriously Alastor you can copy a part of a bar but you can’t make the walls match the rest of the hotel’s walls?

- Husk seems slightly taller than Alastor

- Also Husk also has yellow teeth and if we go by Alastor’s teeth are yellow because he’s a cannibal, Husk might have been a cannibal when he was alive

- Husk clearly knows Alastor, he’s not afraid of him (to an extent, he was still a little shaken by the... Sir Pentious thing). Husk obviously voices his complaints without restraint and isn’t afraid of Alastor hurting him (I guess), and even when he was shaken up he was still the second person to follow Alastor back to the hotel.

- The entire relationship between Husk and Alastor is very intriguing to me! Husk doesn’t fear Alastor, Alastor called him a friend (obviously another jab at Husk but still), and they were in the same picture when Vaggie talked about Alastor being dangerous. I’m guessing they were probably friends once, maybe the picture is them both fighting another demon or fighting each other in like a fall-out.

- Vaggie is very exaggerated when she’s complaining about the bar and it’s beautiful

- Husk in the background as a still image just chugging booze is beautiful

-Angel’s angry face as Vaggie complains about the bar just before he leaves to lunge at her is beautiful and my favorite face

- 27:46 Alastor flipping FLUTTERS HIS EYES AT VAGGIE and you can hear a small sound effect of it and I just thought that was beautiful

- At the same moment Charlie is just rubbing her cheeks and it’s cute

- Right before Alastor starts singing, he throws some red... fire in the air and Charlie follows it with her eyes and she just so awed by it

- The fireplace in the background has an eye and a top hat above it and it just reminds me of Sir Pentious

- Alastor’s song has so many Friends on the Other Side vibes and I love it

- There are so many Christian symbols (and Satanic symbols) in the background of this song and I just don’t want to spend that time looking at each one :l

- Alastor’s shadow is also here further nailing the Friend on the Other Side vibe (not to mention the other shadows and voodoo doll things)

- Poor Niffty, she should never get hurt

- When Sir Pentious is talking and it shows the chibi characters, Charlie, Angel, and Niffty are looking at Alastor and when it zooms in for a split second Angel’s face is the most innocent bab ever

- There’s a building in the background with (again) one eye and a top hat, there’s also a cat building right next to it

- You can see heaven as a planet with a halo...

- There’s also a sun(?) or moon(?) or planet(?) with a pentagram on it

- I know that Egg Boi #OUCH is just a joke, but what if after 666, Sir Pentious just started giving them stupid names like that?

- Again, religious symbols float around Alastor that I’m not going to look into because I’ve taken so much time T_T

- Niffty is actually unfazed by Alastor summoning tentacles and destroying Sir Pentious’ ship. Really she has a normal smile and face and she immediately follows Alastor when he walks back to the hotel

- Angel is still flirting with Husk

- Charlie reassuring Vaggie is adorable

- Are we not going to talk about the carousel and gigantic steam boat that’s just protruding from the hotel

- I also love how the windows at the top of skull designs <3

- There’s an eye on the top of the building and the sign of Happy/Hazbin Hotel could also look like a top hate (why are there so many one-eyed top hats like Sir Pentious’...?)

- Stay tuned TM

- Not from me but, Alastor changes the name to Hazbin Hotel and Hazbin means something that was great before but is terrible now or something that is meaningless

- So Alastor liking terrible jokes is now canon? The dad joke thing wasn’t just a stream thing, it’s actually canon?

- Alastor actually has a red ‘X’ on his forehead, you can see it right after he destroys Sir Pentious’ ship

- The art in the credits shows Cherri Bomb having a tattoo

- I would like to talk a little about the design that’s in the background during the credits. So in the middle is an apple that’s being held by two sharp hands, there are three snakes coming out of it with only one snake fully out but still seems to have originated from the apple. The snake that’s completely out is on the top and has some designs around it that emphasize it, making it look more like a king (the devil, duh). The other two snakes are going down (probably referencing Adam and Eve maybe? Even though they also seem evil I just think of Adam and Eve.) Under them is another snake head. There are two sets of eyes around the top snake, one set has a line going down the middle of each eye like a scar while the bottom set has eyelashes. Even though the bottom set looks more “girly”, it reminds me of Lucifer because of the dots under them. If you want to grasp at straws the complete bottom snake’s tongue sort of looks like the bottom part of the symbol of Lucifer. The three snakes that clearly originate from the apple in the middle can also look like “Three snakes and one charm” if you squint. The symbol above the top snake looks like the infinity symbol combined with the cross, but it’s not the leviathan cross, so maybe just eternal... crucifixion?

- The smoke coming from the pit that Alastor made has souls in it

- I think #23 is depressed because he really wants to be shot... and he was just sitting there next to a bunch of dead hims

- Vivziepop said on a stream something about Lucifer being “generally goofy, but it depends on his voice” or something like that, please correct me if I’m completely wrong. This makes me things that Lucifer is going to have multiple voice actors.

-The Loading Crew “Everything We Know About Hazbin Hotel” brings up a point that it seems like the only things that can kill demons and sinners are the Exterminators’ weapons which are sometimes left behind that demons scavenge, Vaggie also appears to have one. I recommend watching his video, it’s very quick but also brings up points I haven’t addressed. 

And yeah, that’s all for now! ^_^ comment if you have something else to add or think I should change something

[queen-of-deans-booty]

Changing Channels: Final Part

Pairing: Dean x Reader

Word Count: 1,876

Warnings: typical supernatural violence, language, angst, blood, you know the usual

Author’s Note: I am so sorry this is out late. I’ve been dealing with shit the past few days.

I do not own anything from Supernatural. All credit goes to their respective owners. Any and all comments on these are appreciated. I really want to hear what you guys think about this one!

Feedback is the glue that holds my writing together.

Tags at the bottom

When the morning came, Dean wanted nothing more than to get out of this town. Sam was nowhere to be found which was odd, but you didn’t say anything of it until Dean started to notice. When he was finished brushing his teeth, he spit out the rest of what was in his mouth.

“I'm worried, man. What that SOB did to Cas. You know, where is he?”

“Sam isn’t in here,” you called out from bed.

“Where the hell is he?”

“I don’t know. I woke up and he wasn’t here. His bed wasn’t even slept in,” you frowned.

Dean shrugged on his jacket before pulling out his cell phone. He grabbed his keys, and you both walked to the car as Dean called his brother.

“Sam. It's me. Where the hell did you go?” Dean left a message just as you two got in the car.

“Dean? Y/N?” Sam said, his voice a bit strange.

“Where the hell are you?” you asked since he clearly wasn’t in the car.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Noticing the flashing red light on the dashboard, it lit up in time with Sam’s words.

“Shit,” you sighed.

“Oh shit. I don't think we killed the Trickster.”

“Is it too early for an ‘I told you so’?” you asked, crossing your arms.

“Save it,” Sam sighed.

Dean put the car in drive and peeled out of the parking lot and down the road.

“Okay, stake didn't work. So, what, this is another trick?” Dean asked.

“I don’t think it’s a Trickster,” you announced.

“What do you mean?” Dean wondered.

“Don’t you find it kind of weird that he’s so invested in this Michael/Lucifer/Amara storyline? He’s so obsessed with us saying yes, it’s getting suspicious. Did you know that there are currently and only has been four archangels? Michael, Lucifer, Raphael, and—”

“Gabriel,” Dean finished for you.

“Yeah. We know who Michael and Lucifer are. Dean and I met Raphael when Castiel needed him. That leaves Gabriel left. This isn’t a Trickster. He’s an angel, and he’s hiding. And I know just how to get him to admit it,” you grinned, looking at Dean with a mischievous look.

“For once, I like that look in your eyes,” Dean smirked.

Dean drove to the spot where it would be perfect to do your little experiment. If you were right about this, then you get to go home—your real home. If you were wrong about this—and you knew you weren’t—then this really was a Trickster, and you’d need to find another way home. After retrieving the holy oil, you made sure to leave a big enough circle that if Gabriel does show, then he would land in it. Once that was complete, then Dean rummaged through the Impala’s trunk to hide the container of holy oil.

“Dean?”

“What?”

“That, uh, feels really uncomfortable,” Sam cleared his throat. Dean slammed the trunk of the car down hard. “Ow. You sure this is gonna work?”

“No, but we have no other ideas,” he sighed, looking to the sky as if Gabriel could see you three that way. “Alright, you son of a bitch! Uncle! We'll do it!”

“Should I honk?”

“Wow. Sam. Get a load of the rims on you,” Gabriel appeared right in the spot you needed him.

“Eat me.”

“Okay, lady and gentlemen. Ready to go quietly?”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, not so fast. Nobody's going anywhere until Sam has opposable thumbs.”

“What's the difference? Satan's going to ride his ass one way or another.”

“Now,” you glared.

Gabriel rolled his eyes but snapped his fingers. The lights go off in the car, and Sam stepped out of it with narrowed eyes.

“Happy?”

“Tell me one thing. Why didn't the stake kill you?” you asked.

“I am the Trickster,” he chuckled.

“No, you’re not,” you smirked, holding up a flaming cigarette lighter and tossed it to the ground. A ring of fire springs up around the archangel right where you laid the oil out. He looked all around himself before laughing. “You’re an archangel.”

“A what? Somebody slip a mickey in your power shake, kid?”

“Fine, then why don’t you jump out of the holy fire, and we’ll call it our mistake… Gabriel, the youngest of the four. I wonder what your big brothers would think if they saw you here. They do know you’re here, right?” you chuckled, raising an eyebrow in challenge.

Gabriel laughed, but stopped once he knew he’d been caught. The surrounding areas vanished in a burst of static, only to be replaced by the inside of the warehouse you approached days ago.

“Well played, Y/N and Co. Well played. Where'd you get the holy oil?” Gabriel clapped.

“Well, you might say we pulled it out of Sam's ass,” Dean chuckled.

“Where'd I screw up?”

“You didn’t. I wouldn’t have figured it out if it weren’t for Castiel. Ever since I first met you, I knew there was something about you that just didn’t add up. Plus, it was mostly the way you talked about Armageddon.”

“Meaning?”

“Well, call it personal experience, but nobody gets that angry unless they're talking about their own family,” Dean explained.

“So, Gabriel, how does an archangel become a trickster?” you asked.

“My own private witness protection. I skipped out of heaven, had a face transplant, and carved out my own little corner of the world. Till you three screwed it all up.”

“What did Daddy say when you ran off and joined the pagans?” Dean asked.

“Daddy doesn't say anything about anything.”

“So why ditch your family?” you asked.

“Do you blame him? I mean, his brothers are heavyweight douchenozzles,” Dean smirked.

“Shut your cakehole. You don't know anything about my family. I love my father and my brothers. Love them. But watching them turn on each other? Tear at each other's throats? I couldn't bear it! Okay? So, I left. And now it's happening all over again.”

“Then help us stop it.”

“It can’t be stopped.”

“You wanna see the end of the world?”

“I want it to be over! I have to sit back and watch my own brothers kill each other thanks to you three! Heaven, hell, I don't care who wins, I just want it to be over.”

“That’s no way to think. Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” you nodded.

“You do not know my family,” Gabriel laughed. “What you guys call the apocalypse, I used to call Sunday dinner. That's why there's no stopping this, because this isn't about a war. It's about two brothers that loved each other and betrayed each other. A fight against a force that comes out of nowhere, and acts as if they know and rule everything. You'd think you'd be able to relate.”

“What are you talking about?” you asked.

“You sorry sons of bitches. Why do you think you three are the vessels? Think about it. Michael, the big brother, loyal to an absent father. Lucifer, the little brother, rebellious of Daddy's plan. Amara, the surrogate mother who invades and latches on like a leech. Why do you think she’s in prison right now? You three were born to this. It's your destiny! It was always you! As it is in heaven, so it must be on earth. One brother has to kill the other.”

“What the hell are you saying?” Dean glared.

“Why do you think I've always taken such an interest in you? Because from the moment Dad flipped on the lights around here, we knew it was all gonna end with you. Always.”

“No, there is no way in hell that’s happening. I won’t allow it,” you shrugged.

“And therein lies your similarities. See, Amara was just like you. Strong, powerful, and protective. Then she stopped caring and it all went to shit,” he groaned after pausing. “Guys. I wish this were a TV show. Easy answers and endings wrapped up in a bow... but this is real, and it's gonna end bloody for all of us. That's just how it's gotta be.”

“No,” you whispered painfully.

The four of you stared at each other for a long time before Gabriel spoke up about it.

“Now what? We stare at each other for the rest of eternity?”

“No, you’re going to bring Castiel back from wherever you stashed him,” you glared.

“Oh, am I?”

“Yeah, you are. I wasn’t pissed before, but I will be. You don’t want to see that,” you crossed your arms with the promise of your blue magic.

Gabriel groaned, but he snapped his fingers to bring your angelic friend back. Castiel appeared next to you three, and you placed a hand on his arm in comfort.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Hello, Gabriel.”

“Hey, bro. How's the search for Daddy going? Let me guess. Awful.”

“Okay, we’re done here. Come on, Sam and Y/N,” Dean decided, turning and walking to one of the doors.

“Uh. Okay. Guys? So, what? Huh?” Gabriel stuttered as everyone began walking away from him. “You're just gonna, you're gonna leave me here forever?”

“No, we’re not,” you stopped by the door and turned to the archangel. Sam and Dean were already out of the door along with Castiel, but they stayed close to hear what you had to say. “We don't screw with people the way you do. And for the record? This isn't about some prize fight between your brothers or some destiny that can't be stopped. This is about you being too afraid to stand up to your family.”

Lifting your arm, you swept your hand from your left side of your body to your right, the flames dying down in motion of your arm. Your magic was able to extinguish the flames on their own.

“Don’t say I never did anything for you,” you scoffed as the archangel glared.

Sam, Dean, and Castiel left, and you were about to follow when Gabriel stopped.

“I saw her. Amara. I don’t know what she’s doing to you or how she’s communicating with you, but don’t trust a word she says. She’s evil and manipulative and stubborn. Most importantly, she’s real because I’m the one that helped put her away. If you say yes to her, she will destroy everything good about you and then the world.”

“Like Michael and Lucifer?” you asked. “Don’t worry about me. I don’t need someone like you to look over my shoulder. I have family for that.”

Leaving the warehouse, you joined Sam and Dean at the car where they were discussing what happened.

“All that stuff he was spouting in there, you think it was the truth?”

“I think he believes it,” you commented.

“What do we do now?” Dean asked.

“Live our lives the way we want to. I don’t believe in destiny because if I did, I’d at least hope there was something better for us out there. We make our own rules, and the angels are going to regret it if they think they can try and dictate our lives,” you announced, turning to Castiel after. “No offense.”

“None taken.”

“Right about now I wish I was back in a TV show,” Dean huffed, sliding into the car.

“Yeah, me too.”

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[wanna-b-poet31]

An (at this point certainly more than) 4-part Meta on Good Omens Part 3: The Dubious Coping Skills of Aziraphale

Sooooo! Surprise surprise, I have lots and lots of thoughts on the ineffable husbands and their respective trauma/abuse recovery arcs. Sorry if anyone expected different content from me.

Before I get into how the abuse the ineffable husbands endure affects their relationship with each other or how through their relationship together, they are healing, helping both of them recover their issues, I want to examine their current coping skills.

Aziraphale, the loveable bastard

Aziraphale is many things. Loving, kind, naive, powerful, and forgiving. Which, is why the audience and Crowley love him. He’s so gosh darn good at being good (and a bastard). However, Heaven is a highly emotionally abusive and manipulative place and Aziraphale is traumatized by his experiences. 

God openly admits that interacting with her is like playing a game in a dark room where the dealer is always smiling and changing the rules. Essentially, the “parental” figure is distant, and often unsupportive of the “child’s” needs or thoughts.  I already explain in Part 1 how Heaven’s angels (cough cough Gabriel the asshole cough cough) are explicitly emotinally abusive. 

This is compounded not just by the threat of expulsion, but the reality of it. On no uncertain terms, dissenters (demons) are cast out, ultimately denied the love and care supposedly implicit in being a child of God. They’re all typecasted as evil, bad, wrong creatures unable to do the right thing. Although abuse is a complex, often fluid, mix of manipulation, intimidation, and aggression, the lack of communication and implicit expectation of compliance, breeds abuse and instills trauma.  God’s threats of abandonment, coupled with the intimidation by archangels with their own agenda (see part 1), and a lack of any healthy support system loom low over the head of our favorite angel. 

For example, in the beginning, he already knows the difference between kindness and cruelty; right and wrong; good and evil. Instead of he simply “does” his little rebellious act of giving humans his flaming sword, no questions, no permission, no bureaucracy, just action out of kindness and compassion for these creatures who had just gone against a direct order from God. Aziraphale is doing good at this moment. His only concern is with their ability to protect themselves and their children. He knows that not doing so would put these creatures in harm's way. He doesn’t hesitate, he doesn’t ask questions, he doesn’t doubt himself, he simply acts. 

However, everyone else around him who he is expected to trust, would not think his actions are just. God angrily confronts him, Gabriel belittles him, and the guard preparing him for battle insults and shouts at him (calling him a pathetic excuse for an angel).  This all causes him significant anxiety because of the threat of real loss. Not just of love and home and family, but of identity. Aziraphale’s defining defining defining trait is his joy of helping others and pride at being an angel. He loves being “good”, and damn it is he good at the job (if not a tad naive at times). 

But, several times (with God, Gabriel, and the guard respectively), we see the impact of this decision to give away his sword results in a spike in Aziraphale’s anxiety, fear, and denial. All of which are byproducts of his abuse. Unfortunately, his instinct for deflection from a problem is the perfect recipe for several shots of top shelf levels of repression, his primary coping skill.  

Based on his conditioning, he should have shunned the humans just like everyone else. He should have smitten the demon Crowley and turned his back on humanity. He is an angel, after all, and he can’t disobey orders. But he doesn’t hate them, he can’t hate them. He loves them all. 

Aziraphale constantly shows that he loves hard and honestly. He must have been the only one listening when God said to love all of her creatures because he genuinely wants to help them. But, based on the lack of communication and distinct power imbalance between him and the other angels, he’s not sure HOW to do it all the time. 

He’s constantly fearing that he’ll be punished for his compassion, for his love of humanity. Which, in many ways shows the complexity of his abuse at work. He doesn’t hate Heaven or God, not really, he’s a firm believer that they are the purveyor of good up until it’s obvious that no one (save Crowley) ever intended to treat him like an equal. Instead, throughout the series, he deflects from Heaven’s actions, believes them when they say that demons are evil, that giving his sword away was wrong, that God is unquestionable, that he is soft (read: pathetic). Even, and often frequently, when he knows that the information is wrong. 

 He knows through Crowley that demons aren’t (all) bad. It is evident when Crowley performs miracles for him unprompted, or when they go for lunch, or when they time and time again try to save each other. He also knows he loves Crowley based on the fact that he actively seeks out his companionship and is terrified of someone “destroying” his best friend.

He knows from Pepper and Adam and Eve, that giving humans a way to protect themselves is necessary (even if War is bred from it) otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to survive. 

He knows that God IS questionable ANDD that you should be questioning her because drowning!! a whole bunch of people!! including kids!! is wrong!! and he knows as much when he distances himself from Her choices. 

He knows he’s not soft (even though Gabriel tells him he is) because he’s willing to do the difficult thing when the cards are down, and even then he believes fighting a war is not the solution to Armageddon. Hell, he knows neither killing the kid or going to war is going to solve all his problems. But being compassionate, or young, or naive isn’t a bad thing, it makes him stronger and able to identify with Adams’ fears about being able to stop Satan. 

But just because he can see the truth, no, rather ESPECIALLY  because he can see that this is true, he knows he’s woefully underprepared for any sort of confrontation on his feelings. He doesn’t know how to cope with the mental disconnect between his heart and Heaven. How can Heaven be right if they’re wrong about smiting, and safety, and him, and Crowley? The short answer is they can’t. But, he doesn’t know what to do with this paradox, and the doubt scares him to the core. 

At first, he denies there’s anything traumatic going on. There is nothing wrong with the constant fear of falling by stepping out of line. That there is nothing what’s happening or how Crowley is being portrayed as evil when at best he’s wily. He buys the “there’s nothing to see here” mask of Heaven.  

He is clearly more than willing to internalize the dismissive nature of Gabriel (see parallels between being called soft and calling himself soft). He can excuse the fear tactics of Uriel (just trying to prevent the wily snake from doing bad like demons are supposed to do). He can even rationalize the destruction of Noah, Sodom, Gamorah, and Jesus (all part of the ineffable plan). However, none of it is healthy for him, because it requires him to distance himself from the good he wants to do and the abuse he’s suffering. 

But, once it’s too overwhelming to handle, and the cost of acknowledging that there is a problem with the system is too high, he starts repressing his desires. 

For example, he represses his instinct for action allll the time. Where in the garden he just DID give humans his flaming sword, he has to physically restrain himself from action and calling Crowley the moment he learns the truth about Adam. He goes as far as LIE to Crowley that he’d tell him the news when he got it because he’s unable to coordinate the conflicting ideas that demons are bad, but Crowley is good. Subsequently, he represses his love for Crowley down, because the only supportive thing in his life Also is the biggest thing that goes against everything else he’s been conditioned to believe. 

Whenever there’s a whisper of doubt, he falls back on the dogmatism of “I’m an angel”, as a reason for action or inaction and represses his instinct to do anything about it. But a denial of a problem isn’t solving the problem. Repressing his issues aren’t coping with the underlining abuse that the whole power structure is based on.  

Let’s take the break-up scene where shit had hit the fan. 

The end of the world is coming and Aziraphale KNOWS where the anti-christ is. He’s figured it all out, and he needs to act, the thing he is more afraid of doing than anything else. He acted in the garden, had done what needed to be done, and for his efforts was shamed into denying what he had done, and lied to (almost) everyone about giving it away. He got lucky he didn’t fall then (lying to God and all) and he simply doesn’t have the support system to risk her or Heaven’s wrath. 

So, he can’t just act on it. He doesn’t just go in on a Bentley on fire or run away with Crowley, or even just admit that there’s a problem with heaven. He’s to a point where he’s been conditioned into thinking anything but Heaven’s side is wrong. He’s clinging to the only thing that feels stable when he’s scared. Put simply, he can’t admit that the right thing to do here is to tell Crowley, tell him, fix the problem, or fight Heaven and Hell trying. He’s too afraid of the real consequences. He’s too afraid of being alone, without anyone to lean on. And, it doesn’t help that he’s been manipulated for 6000 years into not questioning procedure. 

But then he’s confronted by Crowley. Crowley tells him (under the assumption they were always on their own side) that if they can’t solve Armageddon they’ll run away together and try their best avoiding the war. But to run away would be admitting that Heaven is >gasp< wrong. That there is a flaw with his home, his family, with God’s plan and he doesn’t have the tools to do that. Sure, by this point he’s questioned everything they’ve told him about Demons, but it’s ingrained into his psyche. He either has to trust Heaven or be damned to hell.  There is no middle ground for Aziraphale. 

So he does the only thing he knows how to do in a traumatic situation. He deflects. He reverts back to 6000 years ago when he should be horrified by Crowley. He says “we’re on opposite sides” and that he doesn’t like Crowley. He says they aren’t friends. He lies. Because it’s easier to lie than to confront his trauma.   It’s easier to lie and say there’s nothing there (it’s easier to repress) than to admit that yes, he wants to run away, he wants to be with Crowley, he wants to be on their own side. It’s easier than the alternative which is a loss of identity and safety. 

All of this to say that his reaction is the consequence of repressing his doubts about heaven and his love for Crowley. He explodes at the demon. He says harmful, hurtful, things to his best friend because he doesn’t know how to reconcile the abusive power structure of heaven and the support Crowley has given him. So, he chooses not to act. He can’t leave. No matter how much he wants to go with Crowley at that moment, his repressed feelings won’t let him. Even as he’s days away from Armageddon, he can’t work through his feelings yet. He doesn’t have the tools or security yet. He doesn’t feel safe.

If he weren’t repressing his actions -- if he would look the abusive gift horse (Heaven) in the mouth -- he would see that Heaven is manipulating him, intimidating him until they get what they want -- war. But, he doesn’t know how to cut the cord, or to do the right thing without falling. And falling, without anyone to catch him, is too scary, too daunting. He’s traumatized into believing the only one capable of loving him, even if it’s conditionally, is Heaven and God, and losing that support is out of the question. What he doesn’t realize is that Crowley is head over heels in love with him, and (even if he weren’t in love) prepared to catch Aziraphale from falling. 

Because it’s always Crowley. It is only Crowley -- the supposedly “bad” character -- who supports him about the sword. Only Crowley reassures him his actions and justifications are valid and soothes his anxiety, reaffirming that his position matters. For all the fanfare Crowley makes about being “not nice”, or jabs at Aziraphale’s love of magic, he never once belittles his angel. Sure, there’s light-hearted banter, but nothing he says really has a bite to it. Nothing he does is to harm or degrade Aziraphale.  There’s mutual respect, care, and active love oozing off of Crowley towards Aziraphale. 

The only caveat is that due to Crowley’s own dubious coping skills (see next installment) he clashes with Aziraphale’s understanding of the world at the park.  Consequently, it and makes Aziraphale’s coming to terms with his own Heavenly abuse harder, because he can’t be sure Crowley will be there to catch him. 

It is not until he tries to go to the top, go directly to God, and met with indifference, and then is confronted by the guard who tells him he’s pathetic does he realize that there is, in fact, a problem with the way he’s being treated and the way the system is built to fail. It’s built to harm humanity and destroy everything Angels are supposed to love. It is until he cannot deny it any longer, or risk everything he’s trying to say, that he finally stops repressing his instincts AND HE GOES. He leaves Heaven, a man on a mission style. And it’s not that he falls so much, that he jumps. 

The terror of falling is the lack of control and concent. If he’s pushed, falling backward into the hellfire, he loses his identity, he loses his home, and he loses his only sense of self. If he jumps, however, he’s on his own terms (for the first time in the whole blessed series) and he can make choices about who is in his life and how. If he jumps, he’s not at the mercy of his distant “parent” or his blood-lust fellow angels.  In short, if he jumps, he’s free of the power imposed onto him. If he jumps he’s able to make his own decisions. If he jumps he’ll end up with Crowley. 

So he jumps. 

The bottom line is that repressing his behaviors is harmful to his own mental health and nearly destroys the only meaningful, and unconditional relationship he has. Since the dawn of time, and perhaps before then, Heaven has made it perfectly clear that he is disposable. Aziraphale is just another name on a roster who is causing too much trouble for the strict dogma of Heaven, Gabriel, and God. Those in charge treat him like a half-rate idiot who is missing the point of their war because he’s soft, or naive, or too human. They all treat him as lesser because he’s different, and believe they hold all the power over him.

Which brings me to the whole point of unpacking how Aziraphale fails at coping with trauma. Equality. When he goes to heaven with his news, he’s met with dismissive coddling and outright insult. When he >spoiler< masquerades as Crowley, he is 3 against 1, horribly outnumbered, and not expected (well Crowly’s not expected) to get through the “trial” alive. God herself literally speaks down to him when asking about his sword. There is, ultimately, no winning for Aziraphale in Heaven or Hell’s systems. He has to cobble together his own side to truly be able to move forward and past the trauma. 

AND there is ONLY 1 single character in the whole series sees eye to eye with Aziraphale (quite literally). Only 1 character who treats him as an equal on the same level. 1 person who recognizes Aziraphale as a force to be reckoned with in his own right, and someone who is so worthy of love and trust without question. 

Crowley. 

It is only when he is fully vulnerable to Crowley, that he can stop repressing his doubts and, as it were, put all of his cards on the table. Once Heaven shows its hand, it is painfully obvious that no one ever intended to help or support Aziraphale’s efforts to save humanity. Once he commits to Crowley he can no longer repress his doubts or ignore the reality of the abusive situation he’d been living through. He is forced to reconcile the idea that he is loved as he is with Crowley, whereas in heaven, he is simply a disposable soldier to them, not an equal who deserves to be heard and whose concerns should be considered.

However, despite the trauma and abuse, and more incredibly, despite his repression, he is able to cope with some of his issues throughout time with his relationship with Crowley. He is able to work through his concerns about Noah and Jesus with Crowley by his side, listening and validating his experience and concern as something to be taken seriously like no one else had ever done before. Together, they treat each other with mutual respect, and more than losing his status as an Angel, Aziraphale is terrified shitless at the idea of losing Crowley.  The aforementioned break-up scenes are catalysts that force Aziraphale to make a choice and resist the intimidation and trauma caused by Heaven. And, once he commits to Crowley, there’s no going back, because, for the first time in over 6,000 years, he has a support system ready and able to help him cope with his issues. 

And so, Aziraphale begins his road to recovery thanks to the help of his loving and supportive relationship with Crowley which I will do a deep dive of soon. 

Sooooooooo this section went on wayyyyyy longer than intended. Look out for a Crowley-centric version tomorrow and a few more than 4 installments of this meta over the next week.  #sorry.

TLDR: Aziraphale’s abuse doesn’t allow him to cope with the fact his bosses and his instincts are telling him to do 2 very different things. He manages to cope but only by using denial and repression. It is only when he finally puts down his defenses and being honest with himself that he is not in a good place in Heaven, but he is in a good place with Crowley, that he can start working toward recovery.

Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.

[miyu-hyperfixates]

The Untamed and MDZS appreciation and recommendation post

Okay so fair warning to my small amount of followers, this blog will probably be full of MXTX contents starting from now, because I’ve fallen into MXTX’s hell and I don’t see myself climbing out any time soon.

I’m not even kidding in the span of three months, I’ve watched CQL (like 4 times), watched the special edition, watch the MDZS donghua, read the novel, read the manhua, read a fair amount of fics, discovered the SVSSS’s characters through a few crossover fanfics, started to read SVSSS, then TGCF (as well as their respective manhua up to the last translated chapters) and well generally immersed myself into the fandoms. And I LOVE it! And I have so, so many feelings and thoughts about the characters, the plots, the relationships, everything, that I don’t even know where to start! 

Okay so for those who don’t know what the hell I’ve talking about. MXTX stands for Mò Xiāng Tóng Xiù who is the author of three amazing novels: Mo Dao Zu Shi (MDZS) [also called Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation], The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System (SVSSS) and Tian Guan Ci Fu (TGCF) [Heaven Official’s Blessing]. The Untamed or Chen Qing Ling (CQL) is the chinese drama adaptation of her most well known (as of now) novel MDZS.

I am going to talk about CQL/The Untamed and MDZS (novel version) in this post... But it will probably be followed by posts about TGCF and SVSSS too.

I’ve tried to be pretty vague on several points so that should keep the spoilers at minimum, in case you didn’t watch CQL yet.

[More under the cut] 

Okay so as someone of Asian descent who was born and raised in an European country and spent her formative years watching wuxia and xianxia, The Untamed/CQL is the kind of representation that I really didn’t know I needed and I am so, so glad that I gave it a chance. (Big, big thanks to @shit-happens-bitchachos for reblogging so much CQL contents that the frequent presence of it on my dash got me curious  enough to start watching it).

Watching The Untamed for the first time feels like coming back to a home that you once thought would be frigid but actually became very warm and welcoming without you noticing because you have been away for so long. And it feels both nostalgic and new, in the best possible way. It’s a wonderful feeling, really. 

Where to find it?

You can watch the drama english sub version on Netflix, Viki or Youtube, just typed “The Untamed” and you should find the episodes easily.

To be honest, though I am very thankful for the existence of such platform, I have a slight [read huge] dislike of Netflix’s choice of translation for any Asian movie/tv shows. I mean I’m not going to go off on a debate about official translation vs fan translation, nor westernization and how doing so not only take off a huge layer of subtle/or not so subtle communication but also participate to erase part of the culture. [Because I have opinions about this and I am still very much so cringing about all the “Yanli”s, it is really not the point I’m trying to make right now. ]

So out of the three version, I’d lean more on the Viki version. To be clear though this choice isn’t based on the accuracy of the translation, but strictly on the choice of naming and title convention.

As for the novel, you can find  here a complete english translation made by the Exiled Rebels Scanlations group.

The plot

I’m not going to go into detail about the plot, because I’m sure a lot of people out there managed to do so in a way more articulate way that I ever could.

So basically CQL is about Wei Wuxian, aka the Yiling Patriarch. The Yiling Patriarch is like this huge urban legend that everyone warns their children about, except he actually existed. Why such a reputation? Well, in a Cultivation society where people used spiritual energy to fight and exorcise creatures full of resentful energy (such as ghost, ghouls and other things), the Yiling Patriarch is actually the guy who decided that he was going to use resentful energy to fight resentful energy. What he is doing is called “demonic cultivation” and if you want a western equivalent it would be quite close to using necromancy. And if you want an idea of how blasphemous such method of cultivation is deemed, it would be the equivalent of going to a Christian exorcist organization and yelling loud and clear to all the people there that you’re gonna desecrate the tombs of all holy people and use their corpses to fight ghost and other dark creatures.

So the legend/story of the Yiling Patriarch goes as follow: The Yiling Patriarch and his army of corpses were actually quite useful to turn over the tide of a war that shook the foundations of the Cultivation World, annihilating the strongest Sect of the five Great Cultivation Sects (that lorded over the cultivation society). But some time afterwards the Yiling Patriarch revealed his true colors, and killed more than 3000 cultivators (among them his elder sister and her husband - orphaning their one month old son) before finally ended up being killed by his own little brother.

And now sixteen (or thirteen in the novel) years later, Wei Wuxian’s soul got called back because of a dark ritual. The ritual involved giving up their own soul and offering their body to summon up the soul of a dead, evil, person. The soul summoned would have to accomplish the task the summoner wished for, or the soul would be forever destroyed without being able to ever reincarnate. And so, Wei Wuxian woke up in the body of Mo Xuanyu, a young man who was abused by his family and wished for revenge. While trying to work out what he is supposed to do, Wei Wuxian quickly realized that the Mo family is actually being targeted by fierce corpses that are acting way more aggressively than they should. Turns out that it was because of a possessed spirit sword [a cut out arm in the novel].

Afterwards he encounters Lan Wangji, an esteemed cultivator, one of the strongest of his generation, coming from one of the most righteous Cultivation Sect. And the thing is, Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji appear to have quite a complicated history that dates back to their teenage years. And CQL/MDZS is not only about how they decided to investigate the mystery of the possessed sword/arm (which ended up digging up a lot of secrets and conspiracy ), but also about Wei Wuxian’s past, starting from when he was 15 and meeting Lan Wangji for the first time.

The few things that you’re probably going to feel/think while watching the few first episodes

Confusion I think I’m not even kidding when I say you’re supposed to be in a state of perpetual confusion for the first two episodes... There’s this huge info dump, in the first five minutes of episode 1, then you’ll have to navigate this new world feeling as confused as dead-for-sixteen years Wei Wuxian... You’ll meet dozens of characters and if you can’t remember their names or who they are it’s normal don’t worry. Each character has a birth name (Wei Ying, Lan Zhan) and a courtesy name that (Wuxian, Wangji)... And so if you see Wei Ying or Wei Wuxian just know that it refers to the same person. And to complicate things further some characters also have a title (Yiling Patriarch, Hanguang-Jun)  other people might use to refer to them. So really, if you want to understand what is going on, you might want to note the name, title and relationship down... But it’s kinda tedious?  I promise it is unnecessary as those characters will all be introduced properly in the flash-back starting at the end of episode 2, and you’ll fully be able to get used to them and keep track of them. Of course, if you managed to remember a few names, once the character is being introduced in the past, you’ll get a “ Oh so at some point, this is going to happen to them” sort foreshadowing/foreknowledge, which is neat, I guess. [I recommend going back to watch the first two episodes, once the flash-back is over, to fully grasp what was going on there].

What the hell am I even watching? Okay so this one might only just be me but I was pretty hooked by the story by episode 3... and then I reached episode 8 and 9 and I kid you not, I went “Oh boy... that’s.... yeah okay... *cover face with hands*”... So I was cringing pretty hard for those two episodes out of second-hand embarrassment at the extras actors acting level... Like woah... It was supposed to be scary and threatening and all but I couldn’t just take them seriously? (You’ll know what I’m talking about when you get there)... That with some plot points made me seriously consider stopping right there.... But thankfully I didn’t. So you really just need to pass the first two episodes [which are really good] and cringe your way through the two most abyssal episodes in the show (in my opinion) and everything will go smoothly afterwards.  Though to be fair, it might be explained by the fact that no one expected that CQL would have the highest number of reviews of Chinese drama, nor that it would be the highest earning drama of 2019 and certainly not that it would accumulate 8 billions views on Tennent by May 2020. Where am I going with this?  Well it was certainly no Game of thrones in terms of budget... That’s what I’m trying to say. It had a low budget production... and well in a fantasy world where everyone and their grandma use supernatural power to fight each other and demonic creatures, special effects are a must. Choices had had to be made [and while I am very thankful for the aspects they decided to use the money on] the special effects were very touch and go.

Okay but are they going to be together or is this another case of queerbaiting? So if what you’re asking is “will we ever get a kiss, a love confession or definite proof of their relationship?”. The very short answer is “No.” You’ll never see any of those on screen for the very simple and good reason that there are censorship laws in China regarding queer relationship on screen. “So it’s basically queerbaiting?” Again no. CQL was adapted from a BL chinese novel. In the novel there is absolutely no room for doubts that they are together. But because of the censorship the producer teams had to remove all definite and obvious proof of romance, but it also means that they had to be creative and anything in the subtext or subtle areas was a go. Like really they crammed more homoerotic text (like at this point is this even subtext) in the show than in all other kinds of adaptations (including the novel, where we get kissing, sex and eloping). It got the point that contrarily to the novel, donghua and manhua where the whole Cultivation world thought Lan Wangji hated Wei Wuxian and that they couldn’t stand each other,in the show everybody and their dogs knew that the two were very close.  Also, while I absolutely hate that those censor law exist and am very disappointed that such homophobic mentality still exist and that we won’t get a full adaptation and explicit of their love story, I must say that because of this my demisexual ass absolutely love the depiction of their love in the show. I mean, when you don’t have the “easy way out” of kissing and sex and so all to show that they is definitively romance material going on here... You have to get creative, you have to convey it with all other gestures... touching, gazing at each other and so on... And it creates such a soft but intense  and intimate environment around them...By the way I’m not trying to negate their sexual relationship in the novel (#LetWangxianFreelyExpressTheirSexualLives)... I’m just saying that I’m not sure the producing teams would have gotten to such a length in the show if they could just have adapted the explicit romance scenes. Now if somehow they’d had managed to keep the same level of intense subtext and be able to adapt the romance scenes too, that would have been the best, but well...

The reasons you should still absolutely watch/read it? 

The plot

The way all those character journeys and stories are interwoven in such a cohesive picture is nothing short of amazing. And the way that Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji unravel events that happened more than a decade ago piece by piece [or rather body part by body part] is so very well done. And of course half way through, you think that you’ve got the full pictures, and you’re sort of gloating all the while because you see it coming from miles away and how can the cast be that stupid... And well you are not wrong. Watch out for the canary though.   The show chose to move a few things in term of timeline (character appearing and events happening way before they were supposed to... )... They also added a few original plot points in the past.... So as a results it feels slightly less cohesive and coherent than in the novel. Anyway I won’t go into details here because I’ve got this super long post planned where I’d detailed all the differences between the novel and the show and why some things worked in my opinion but not other. CQL and MDZS are what a properly balanced plot-driven and character-driven show/novel look like.

The relationships

Of course, Wangxian (Wei Wuxian/Lan Wangji) should absolutely be mentioned. Because throughout the story in the past, you watch as young, wild, ingenious, thinking-out-of-box Wei Wuxian meet an equally young seemingly inflexible, impassive, following 3000+ rules in his daily lives Lan Wangji, you watch how their personality clashes before finally acknowledging each other skills, you watch how they hurt during the war, how quickly they had to grew up, you watch how one of them had to watch the other walking down a quickly crumbling path, being alienated by the world without being able to help, you watch how they lost each other, before finally finding each other again after sixteen/thirteen years. And then you can finally watch how soft they are with each other, how in-sync they are, the trust, the devotion, the willingness to stand by each other against the whole fucking world. And as I already mentioned before, because of the censure law in China, you’ll never can’t and will never get to see Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian say “I love you” to each other on the show. It still manages to convey “I love you” in every other possible way without having them actually say the words. I mean at this point it can’t even be considered subtext... It’s plain text written in bold underlined font that can be read in every single one of their interactions, and sometimes even when the other isn't even there, [It's basically subtitles! Hah! Okay getting out of there].

It helps that the chemistry between the two actors is absolutely mind-blowing. And the acting is nothing short of amazing. If you’ve been in the spn fandom then you might know that Jensen is king of the micro-expressions ... well I’m afraid that he has been dethroned by Wang Yibo (Lan Wangji’s actor) in my mind.

But really, wangxian is not the only relationship worth mentioning in CQL/MDZS. One of the other huge highlight in my opinion is the several siblings dynamics. There are about seven sets of siblings among the whole cast and because shitty, shittier and shittiest parents were apparently the norm for their generation, we get to see the trope of “eldest child basically raised their younger siblings” in five different flavors. Of course the main focus is on Wei Wuxian and his siblings, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t see the sheer care and protectiveness oozing out of the other four sets of siblings. As someone who loves family bonding (and especially found families), I really appreciate the fact that among those sets of siblings, there are some that are related by blood, some who are half-siblings and some who are not related biologically but consider themselves siblings regardless. And while all their relationships are different - because they are different people - they all do share the same love for their siblings.  “How far are you willing to go for your siblings?” “How much are you ready to sacrifice for them?” The show answers those two questions in various all throughout the story in a more or less oblique way, and right there lies the motivation behind a lot of the characters’ actions, good or bad. Their relationship with their siblings is actually one of the major driving force of the characters (Wei Wuxian among them). And I love it, because it shows that love comes in a many, many forms.

  The overarching themes

“What’s right, what’s wrong? Who’s good, who’s evil? Who’s strong, who’s weak?”

In such an elitist society who will judge you at the drop of a hat (especially if you have the bad taste of coming from a more unfortunate lineage), how can you define the difference between “right” and “wrong”? Wherein the midst and the aftermath of a blood thirsty war, the distinction between “good” and “evil” more often than only lies on where you were born and/or your family name rather than where you actually stood or what you did in the war. This right here is the very huge underlying theme that is being woven throughout the show/novel. Not only are we, the viewer/reader, invited to think/judge for ourselves based on the actions of the characters... But our main character, Wei Wuxian verbalizes those doubts and questions explicitly a few times and implicitly in the stand and choices that he decided to take. And due to Wei Wuxian’s influence, Lan Wangji who is used to follow his 3000+ rules on a daily life basis without ever questioning them, starts to do so. (“Do not befriend evil.”, “Be righteous.” )  What does it mean to be righteous? Must the notion of righteousness always align with general opinion? How do you define the ‘evil’ that you are not supposed to befriend? Is my definition the same as yours? Is my definition the same as the rest of the world? And if it is not the case, does it necessarily means that I’m in the wrong?  And the very obvious answer to those questions is “No, there is no visible line between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ or ‘evil’... Nor is there any universally agreed on way to act in order to fit in one category or the other...” And this answer is illustrated in all the ways those numerous characters are depicted: their love, their hatred, their fear, their pain, their joys, their tears, their motivations, their frustrations, their shortcomings, their hidden or not so hidden agenda, their flaws... All of them are depicted in such an awesome and wholesome human way.  They are not fully good or fully bad, they are human, with all that it entails... Main characters and main villains included (or rather, I’d say especially them) [Though the show tended smooth and cover this aspect a little bit more than the novel in my opinion]  

“Don't you understand? When you’re standing on their side, you’re the bizarre genius, the miraculous hero, the force of the rebellion, the flower that blooms alone. But the second your voice differs from theirs, you’ve lost your mind, you’ve ignored morality, you’ve walked the crooked path.” (Jiang Cheng)

Another theme that is strongly address here is the matter of “Public Opinion”. Despite (or rather because of) how fickle it is, public opinion, rumors (no matter how unfounded) could so easily ruins your reputation, your standing. And if you loose their favors than all your previous actions (no matter how praised it had been in the past) would be seen with a blackened lens. I remember feeling as frustrated as Wei Wuxian at the lack of logic, the rhetoric employed and the sheer hypocrisy that had been portrayed by the mass. I think that there is one character that can be easily recognized as the pure personification of “Public Opinion”, he is without a doubt meant to be the “voice of the mass, of the bystanders whose opinions shouldn’t really matter but actually does a lot”. I won’t tell who it is, it’s pretty obvious if you watch the show... And I think that we are meant to feel annoyed at such characters. I think we are meant to be as frustrated as that one character who at a mass gathering tried to make a stand, tried to do the right thing, but was quickly shut down with dubious rhetoric and blatant disregard because their voice didn’t carry enough power. And last but not least, the show/novel broaches the issue of how social standing is considered very, very much dependent on your circumstance of birth. Like I said before the cultivation world in CQL/MDZS is inherently elitist. In order to be able to cultivate you must learn the proper techniques and at a quite young age. But it is not something that you could do on your own unless you’re some kind of genius or prodigy. Which means that you must attract the attention of a nearby sects or begs them to take you in as a disciple. It means though that you’ll probably start a little later than the disciples that were born directly within the sect [inner disciples], meaning you’ll probably end being weaker. However even if by some truly dedication and perseverance you manage to the same level as the inner disciples, you’ll still only be seen as an outer disciples, nothing more than cannon fodder in the eyes of society. In all the major sects, there is a distinctive mark, objects that only disciples coming from the sect family line are allowed to carry, as an irrevocable sign of their high standing in society and their inherent privileges. There are some exceptional circumstances though where someone of low birth status might reach this elitist sphere. But no matter how high they reach, how outstanding they are, in some way they will always be reminded (sometimes behind their backs, sometimes subtly, sometimes right in their face) of the stigma of their birth. There are three characters in particular, whose journeys mirror and foil each other a lot.   And I think it is very interesting to see this “son of a prostitute” or “son of a servant” or “street rat” or “bastard” advanced through society. They all received very different upbringings, despite all starting more or less at a low point. And I liked that the way they decided to live later on and how they tackle/handle the cultivation world  is very much reflected and influenced by their upbringings rather than the circumstances of their birth. It brings up this very strong message that, if they are the way they are it is not because of who their parents are, but rather how the people around them reacted to them. The way they are right now is not the fruit of their birth but a direct consequences of the rejection/acceptance of society. And so when you look at them, you can’t help but see their journeys as a three forking road paths reflecting the other like twisted mirrors. You look at their actions now, then back their different circumstances and you can’t help but think “Ah, that is what might happened if things were different.” [There is a reason that canon-divergence and time travel fix-it are my favorite tropes... my bias is really showing here... haha] And it really, really hammers on the importance of kindness in the face of misery and discrimination. Kindness  and acceptance at the right moment, no matter how small can change everything. Sometimes, something even as small as a candy.  

The movie sets and props So I mentioned before that the budget of CQL really wasn’t that high and they had to make choices. And I could only applaud their choices, because really, wah! Just look at the main sects locations, the scenery, the backgrounds. It’s so beautiful!! [Had I had any gifing talent I would have included them so that you could get the full mind-blowing experience... so I’ll just send you to @gusucloud​ blog, where all the gifs and edits are amazing, (Cloud Recesses here and Lotus Pier here) and in this post  have my lame-ass screenshots instead.]

The fine details, the workmanship in most of the props in the background, the swords!!! *Incoherent flailing*

[I didn’t manage to get any close-up of the swords... but believe me, they are piece of arts!]

The music

The soundtrack of the show is absolutely amazing and beautiful.

You know how in movies and tv shows couples always seem to have “a song”... like “Oh! Look our song is playing!”... Weeeeeell...

Wangxian do too and it’s literally their song, as in their actors are singing it. You can of course hear it in the ending, but... but! I think the way it was used within the episode was very striking. It’s one of the many ways the producer teams managed to convey the romantic aspect of their relationship. And it was very well done.

Wuji, by Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo

Wuji, instrumental piano + flute + Zither version

Just imagine, dude just resurrected from his 16 years of deadness and you see him moping at night by playing this beautiful tune with a freaking leaf... just because he saw some cultivators wearing the same uniform as Lan Wangji... So at this point you know that this song might means something but well, you don’t really get it...

The second time you hear this tune, we are on a mountain, and it’s through a bamboo flute that Wei Wuxian used to appease and calm down an agitated corpse [who he apparently knows]... He is luring ‘it’ out to a safe place, so he is playing the song while slowly moving back one step at a time. Then his back suddenly bumps into someone... This person catches his hand. The flute playing abruptly stops and the full instrumental version with piano+flute is suddenly blaring out in the background. And then it’s as if the whole world stops as they gaze at each other, while the music keeps playing. And really, you might fully understand the weight of their gazes, or their history, but you know that it’s there... That’s the moment where you look at them looking at each other, grasping at each other wrist, where you can still hear their song in the background... and can only go “Oh. Oh.”  [Then of course a purple ball of pure anger just had to come and interrupt them. Excuse you, they were quickly having a moment there. Kidding aside, It was such a nice scene, it’s hand down one of my favorite scene of the whole show, and the music played a really huge part in my opinion.]

And if it wasn’t enough to hammer it down. The third times will definitively do it. So both of them are fifteen years and meet each other for the first time, when Wei Wuxian goes to study at Lan Wangji’s sect. Of course there first impression of each other is disastrous, what’s with Wei Wuxian insisting to come inside despite having lost his invitation and Lan Wangji clearly stating that no one is allowed without invitation. Of course it doesn’t help that after running back to fetch his lost invitation, Wei Wuxian snuck in after curfew (breaking a protective ward on his way), while smuggling two jar of alcohol. All of the above are forbidden in Cloud Recess, by the way. So our boy just casually broke three rules and then who catch him, right when he is climbing over the wall? Lan Wangji, who’s on patrol, of course. [Like I said, disastrous first impression]...And so after frostily listing all the rules Wei Wuxian broke not even five minutes in , Lan Wangji tries to bring Wei Wuxian to be disciplined. Wei Wuxian, of fucking course, resists. And the two proceed to fight (sword and all).

Cue their song playing as they cross swords on the rooftop of Cloud recesses, under the light of a full moon night.

If that is not a meet-cute I don’t know what it is.

Anyway this song is played many, many more times in the show and I’m not talking about them because I don’t want to spoil anyone.

Also as an aside, they don’t appear in the show... But there are character songs that have been recorded. Some of them sung by the actual actors and other not. And while all of them are really good, if there is absolutely one that you must listen to, it’s “Bu Wang” by Wang Yibo the actor of Lan Wangji.  Make sure to watch the official MV only after watching the whole show (because it’s spoilery) and to activate the cc for the lyrics translation. It’s such a beautiful and painful song; and a very insightful reflection of Lan Wangji’s character.  I love it.

Lan Sizhui and A-Yuan

No argument or explanation needed, you’ll see when you get there. I dare you not to like those small fluffy cinnamon rolls! 

The Junior Quartet

Okay those ducklings deserve a whole sub-section on their own. Not only because they are all amazing kids but because of what they represent.  

What is really great here is that since the story takes place over the span of 16/13 years, you get to see three different generations at various stage of their development. In the past you get to see the parents generation at their sum-up while there child, the following generation [Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji etc] from their teenage years to young adulthood. Then in the present you see the teenagers reaching the age their parents were (more or less, probably slightly younger) and the next generation (the ducklings) about the same age as Wei Wuxian’s generation were at the beginning. And the juxtaposition between the two pictures is just so, so very telling because the differences are glaring.

I’m going to borrow the words from qrbat who wrote this wonderful fanfiction, “tell some storm” on ao3.

The parents generation was a generation of Pride and Greed, it was a generation that lauded standing your ground no matter what and refusing outsider help. They were the generation which raised their children as a “generation of War”. A war that they started and that their children, teenagers, had to fight and end for them. And in comparison the junior generation seems so unexperienced so soft... and that’s a good thing, because it means that those children hadn’t had to experience the hardship of war, hadn’t had to grow up so fast because they basically didn’t have any decent parental figures to help them. Instead of perpetuating the cycle of hate and war started by their elders, the generation of War raised the next generation as a generation of peace, as a “generation of Love” and acceptance.

And it is amazing because the juniors, simply by being who they are, are embodying  this  message from Wei Wuxian’s generations to their parents “See? This is what it means to parent. I had to sacrifice my childhood and innocence to fight your war and I still managed to raise such amazing and kind children, what was your freaking excuse? I will not be like you. Times are changing and they are changing for the better.”

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*Look at length of the post* *snort* Right. Okay, would you believe me, if I told you that in the beginning this post was supposed to be an appreciation post for all three of MXTX’s works and not just MDZS because I was afraid it would be too short? Yup so turned out I had a lot more things to say than I thought.  Please feel free to react or just message me about anything MXTX’s fandom related... I am desperately in need of friends to discuss with about MXTX’s stuff!