WAMBUS X TRIFFANY HEADCANONS BECAUSE I ABSOLUTELY CAN. (Will be fluff and angst). Warning, this list is LONG, so let’s hope I can catch your attention you lottaham fans.
•(small reminder, my version of the grumpuses have tails) whenever the 2 see each other, their tails tend to wag from excitement. They always tease each other about it, making the other embarrassed
•If Triffany were to ever get hurt, even if it was a tiny scratch, Wambus would be PANICKING. He doesn’t like seeing his wife hurt. In some cases, if the injury is bad enough, he’ll just- scoop her up and bring her back to the house.
•Wambus has beaten the sh!t out of people before because they would insult Triffany in some way, shape, or form. Depending on how bad the insult(s) was shows whether or not that person is surviving to see another day. Same if someone insults wambus, but instead of physical retaliation, Triffany uses some very creative insults.
•Both of them have NO self control when it comes to a specific food item. For wambus it’s salami (inspired by multiple salami wambus posts from @orb-the-watchman , hope you don’t mind the ping-), and for Triffany, thin mints. She would fucking love thin mints, you cant fight me-
•They would both do weed, especially if they both got the time for it. Imagine that it’s 12 at midnight, and you just find the two of them, high as fuck, with their favorite foods, watching some sort of cheesy Netflix movie.
•(this is based off something my parents used to do as teens) when Triffany and wambus were younger, Wambus would let Triffany experiment her make up skills on him. Sometimes it’d turn out really well, and other times, he looked like a clown. either route tho was an enjoyable experience for the both of them
•Both have nightmares every now and then, and when the other finds out? It’s cuddles in bed IMMEDIATELY. They take each other very seriously when it comes to nightmares, so they do their very best to help out when the other suffers.
•speaking of cuddles- SPOONING. Wambus; has long fur and a long ass tail. And moobs. And there’s Triffany; curvy, fluffy, and has hands that are bigger than her husbands. Most of the time, it’s ➡️ ⬅️, Wambus is the big spoon. Triffany’s face is in wambus’s chest fluff (JEALOUS >:( ) and wambus’s tail is carefully intertwined with triff’s as he spoons her.
BUT in some cases, it’s ⬅️ ⬅️, with Triffany getting to be the big spoon. She’ll carefully wrap her hands around wambus’s waist and gently scratch his fur as she’d wrap her tail around one of his legs.
•Their wedding rings have each others names engraved onto it as a way to show how much they love each other <3
•Wambus can’t swim that well, the best he can do is puppy dog paddle. (Blame his fur) Triffany however is one of the BEST swimmers out there. So if wambus ever wants to go into deeper water, he’ll just wrap his arms around Triffany, and off they’ll go! (Triffy strongggg :D)
•They Both listen to the other rant about their special interest, even if they don’t understand the concept. :3
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We all already know Mizu and Akemi are narrative foils. But you know what? Lemme just say it, here's what I think:
Taigen and Mikio are foils.
Not necessarily to each other as individuals in the way that Mizu and Akemi juxtapose each other, but mostly in the contrast between their relationships with Mizu.
I've covered specific parallels between Taigen and Mikio in other posts I wrote; but as the number of parallels I'm noticing between them keeps piling up, I'm compelled to just compile them all in one post. So! This is, thus, the post in question.
First of all, let's look at their similarities.
1. Their status in society is the same. They are both samurai who lost their honour and have dreams of reclaiming it.
2. They are also both diligent as they strive to achieve this goal, they both care deeply about their work, but here as they begin to contrast, as the work in question and way they go about their goals is different:
For Mikio, his work is in taming and rearing horses; in order to prove himself, he must tame Kai—a willful and strong horse—and present it to his lord.
For Taigen, his work is in sword fighting and martial arts; in order to prove himself, he must kill Mizu—a willful and strong swordsman—and present her dead body to his lord.
In the parallel above, not only are Taigen and Mikio contrasting each other, but Mizu and Kai are placed in comparison as well. And of course, Kai is Mizu's horse, and represents her. Which is why, when later, Mikio sells Kai off, it represents the way he is tossing Mizu (and their relationship) aside.
From there, the rest of the details of their character begin to contrast and juxtapose each other more clearly. So let's look at those differences, shall we?
Their backstory:
Mikio was a great samurai who was banished.
A somebody to a nobody.
Taigen was a fisherman’s son who rose to the top.
A nobody to a somebody.
2. The first time we meet them on-screen:
Mikio is an adult. An older man. Mizu's superior in age. He is Mizu's to-be husband. A love interest.
Taigen is a child. A young boy. Mizu's peer in age. He is Mizu's bully. An antagonist.
3. Their maturity and growth:
Mikio is mature, but stuck in his ways.
Taigen is immature, but capable of changing and learning.
4. Their overall attitude:
Mikio is generally relaxed, easy-going and unfussy.
Taigen is uptight, irritable and severe.
5. How they talk to and conduct themselves around Mizu:
Mikio is aloof, soft-spoken, and serious.
Taigen is obnoxious, brash, and sarcastic.
Mikio is quiet, speaking only when spoken to, even when Mizu turns to smile at him and shows openness to be near him.
Taigen is loud, talking while others are silent, even when Mizu turns from him and shows no interest in conversing with him.
Mikio doesn't show much of who he is to Mizu throughout their marriage, despite their growing affection.
Taigen openly shares his traumas and life story to Mizu during their brief alliance, despite their mutual antagonism.
6. Their external vs internal selves:
Mikio is calm, gentle, and considerate on the outside.
Taigen is hot-headed, rude, and selfish on the outside.
Mikio is cowardly and deceitful on the inside.
Taigen is brave and loyal to a fault on the inside.
Mikio tells Mizu that he wants to know and see all of her.
But he scorns and betrays her, the woman he loves.
Taigen tells Mizu that he wants to duel and kill him.
But he endures torture to not betray him, the man he hates.
9. Their hair, a symbol of their honour:
Mikio's topknot is untied by Mizu during their spar.
This humiliation occurs in private, the two of them alone in a rural location where no one can see them.
Taigen's topknot is cut off by Mizu during their duel.
This humiliation occurs in public, the two of them being watched by many others in the Shindo Dojo.
10. Their power dynamic with Mizu:
Mikio believes he is Mizu's mentor.
He teaches her to throw knives, how to ride and care for horses, and about the tactical benefits of using a naginata.
Taigen believes he is Mizu's equal.
He views Mizu as a samurai like himself who received all the same teachings he did, and who possesses the same values.
11. Their perceptions of Mizu:
Mikio sees Mizu's feminine side first.
He sees her as sweet and gentle, but also clumsy and incompetent.
Taigen sees Mizu's masculine side first.
He sees her as terrifying and deadly, but also strong and skilled.
12. The way they approach sparring with Mizu:
Mikio only spars with Mizu once. As the fight progresses and she is beating him, he tries to put a stop to it. When she teases/provokes him, he starts taking the fight personally and seriously, finding no enjoyment in it.
Taigen spars and brawls with Mizu all the time. No matter how many times Mizu beats him, he doesn't back down. When Mizu challenges him with a chopstick, he is eager to compete with her and gladly rises up to the challenge.
Mikio and Mizu's one and only spar is a friendly match; Mizu is smiling and having fun while he grows increasingly frustrated.
Taigen and Mizu's last-seen spar is a playful wrestling match; both him and Mizu are having fun and laughing.
Mikio cannot deal with Mizu being better than him, so he scorns her and walks off, avoiding her thereafter.
When Taigen cannot deal with Mizu being better than him, he follows her to observe her moves and continues training in hopes to eventually beat her.
After being bested by Mizu once, Mikio leaves her and sells the horse he'd previously gifted to her.
After many times losing to Mizu and fighting alongside her, Taigen commends her and admits she is better than him.
13. When Mizu pins them down in a friendly spar:
Mikio sees Mizu's whole face objectively.
Taigen stares at Mizu's mouth and eyes.
Mikio gets angry when she kisses him, throwing her off of him and snapping at her, calling her a monster.
Taigen gets aroused, apologising, so she pulls herself off of him.
14. Mizu's blue meteorite sword is a reflection of her soul. She believes most are undeserving to face it, let alone hold it. And on that note:
Mikio is the first person (chronologically) that Mizu fights against using her sword.
Taigen is the first person (we see on-screen) that Mizu fights against with her sword.
Mikio is the first person (chronologically) to ever hold her sword, as she passes it to him, letting him wield it.
Taigen is the first person (we see on-screen) to ever hold her sword, as she passes out, and he picks it up and carries it for her.
15. Then, last but not least, in Fowler's fortress, when she is drugged and in pain, she hears Ringo's voice in the dungeon. She then follows it to an open cell:
Mizu first sees Mikio as a hallucination, the sight of him haunting her and causing her to lose her grip on reality. Her eyes glow a surreal blue to represent this.
Her Mama appears then and says Mizu's name accusingly.
Mizu then sees Taigen, but he is real, the sight of him a relief and grounding her back to reality. Her eyes return to their normal blue colour to represent this.
Taigen looks at Mizu weakly and says her name softly.
Then, later, when facing Fowler, her revenge awaiting her, she instead chooses to follow her conscience (represented by Ringo's voice in her mind), putting aside her vengeance for a time, in order to save Taigen.
So that's basically all the ones I've noticed so far, but even then, I feel there's already so much that forms a contrast between these two.
What makes it especially incredible about these juxtapositions is that Mikio was Mizu's husband, the man she had fallen in love with, the one person she had ever been intimate with, the man who made her begin to accept herself, to put down her desire for vengeance and instead live a life of peace and happiness.
So for Taigen to have so many parallels with him... Do you see what I'm saying here!
Not to mention that Mizu clearly already has some burgeoning attraction to him, as indicated by how she thinks of him when asked about her desires. And Taigen clearly has shown interest as well (see: him getting a boner after their spar, him holding her hand and telling her, "We're not done yet.").
And on the topic of speculating future possibilities of this relationship, this post by @stromblessed has pointed out yet another parallel between Taigen and Mikio:
Mizu promises Taigen to meet him for their duel in autumn.
Mizu fell in love with Mikio and duelled him during autumn.
With all that said, I do believe Mizu and Taigen's relationship is definitely hurtling towards something. But whether they will actually end up together in a sustainable relationship and have a happily ever after? Well, that is a whole other story; we'll just have to wait and see.
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i promised cats metaposting 2 bagpipe boogaloo and i am a bitch of my word here we go
cats 1998: the rum tum tugger + these hands are rated G for grizabella
(theory wank under cut call that catracter development)
(theory wank about munkustrap & grizabella here for those uninitiated)
RIGHT SO unfortunately this one is no longer semi-coherent overanalysis of microexpression but a full descent into conspiratorial madness, so please remain aware of the fact that this is a tangent missing textual support at the best of times. it's entirely possible and even likely that rum tum tugger is genuinely just a bitch to grizabella because that's who he is as a person and doesn't like what she smells like or something idfk. anyway.
welcome to my red string board of why rum tum tugger actually doesn't dislike her for no reason and totally has depth and yeah we're poor little meow meowing a white boy with more hubris than eyeliner, classic essay genre on tumblr, at least he's a catboy this time and the hubris-eyeliner ratio is actually a close call.
anyway, for any of my theorizing to make sense, here are the two headcanons it's all based on:
grizabella is an (ex-)wife of old deuteronomy and the mother of rum tum tugger (and munkustrap if you're so inclined)
grizabella left the jellicle cats at some point when rum tum tugger was a kitten or otherwise a very young cat
and honestly the rest just flows from the mommy issues to be honest. there's a load of alternate explanations and theories and headcanons and mine's by no means the right one necessarily, but i do have to admit the family angst it allows for is balls to the walls insane because it just. it fits what we see on screen so well!
look at this clown i love him. he ONLY does the puff-up at grizabella. and even though that supports my theorizing it's also honestly a bit of a loss i think. it's such an evocative cat-thing. i want him to do that when something jumpscares him lmao. i NEED him to do that at old deuteronomy jokingly and get cuffed on the back of the head by munkustrap for being a professional youngest child. anyway
don't get me wrong, the fact that tugger has a grudge against grizabella isn't anything special, most older cats do; hell, some of them deliberately walk past her Judgementally (bombalurina, notably) or shake their head at her in disapproval (jennyanydots), but it's so pointedly constant and so pointedly Pointed with tugger that it draws my eye. every time she appears, he has to clearly and explicitly broadcast his displeasure with the fact that she's daring to breathe at them.
like, she's not In His Way or anything here. he doesn't have to walk past her if he doesn't want to. he doesn't have to look at her; plenty of other cats pretend she doesn't exist when she looks at them. but not only does he do all those things, he explicitly looks at her and puffs his coat up again. he's walking at a fairly brisk pace toward her and actually slows down to do it. it's such a deliberately mean thing to do it's stuck between really extra and really petty. exactly the same with the jellicle choice scene.
my man's being so petty this should be constituted as bullying lmao. look at that! nobody likes you still! sucks to be you i guess! like. this man would be pouncival doing the fake pranks and scratching her if he was a kitten. he's just, constantly upping his level of mean to her. in the first scene he at least has the decency to walk out in the opposite direction of her.
a really professional youngest child. again, all that ^ is fairly grounded thought on character performance i think if you don't really connect it to anything, but i'm connecting it to abandonment issues for maximum ouch lmao.
so, bear with me for a moment: for whatever reason, grizabella leaves the jellicles, including her husband and kid(s). (if you're a fan of the theory about macavity being the third brother to munkustrap and tugger, i mean, she might've just left with him because he was her kid. i dunno.) and you're tugger. Baby tugger, even. you don't understand why she'd leave you. was it you? were you too much? were you not enough? of course not, but you're a little cat with a lot of pride and all the makings of a Petty Little Bastard in you, so you say fuck all that. i'm not too much; i'm actually more than enough. i'm the best! and i'll make damn sure you never forget it!
i feel like if you include munkustrap in that too it gets to be a really interesting dynamic. tugger's mean and angry and going out of his way to show it, and munkustrap is just kind of. "can we not do this" about it. really seems like he'd rather be somewhere else, but, i mean, welcome to The Unpleasant Shit being his job. professional eldest sibling.
she approaches him and he actively goes absolutely not oh look at that what a nice corner i'll just go stand over there. meanwhile tugger's determined to be all OH! OH LOOK WHO'S HERE!!!! WELCOME HOME CHEATER!!!!!! about it. like i already made a post about this so i won't get into it again but i really don't think munkustrap is all that mad at her, which gives tugger's attitude some nice contrast.
continuing with dynamics for a moment, i feel like tugger either has real Attuned Parental Figure Senses or is surprisingly perceptive for his character? this isn't necessarily connected with the point before, but i mean, he stops his whole entire number MID-DANCE MOVE to point out grizabella. he does do it with great flow though you must admit.
he loves attention!! that's established!! whether or not he's up for it at All Times we can have a discussion about (he really just dips out after his number to recharge for a good while lol) but he's here having the time of his life, BOOM one whiff of grizz and he's tearing down the party decorations, that's it, everyone go home.
i'd attribute it to him just Really Having That Big of a grudge if he didn't also kinda sorta activate his Deuteronomy Detect power during the lad's arrival LMAO.
look at that! he beats munkustrap to it! admittedly i can't see the rest of the stage so it might be that all the other cats already saw it and he's just pointing old deuteronomy out to munkustrap as the latter's too busy looking the other way. but it's still a funky way to get in character traits besides Mean & A Whore!
ok and another notable thing, and to me something really interesting, it that tugger never does end up touching grizabella, even though he has the choice to.
after she's first accepted back via touch from victoria, the cats sort of line up to show their affections too. it's a really nice scene in my opinion, you get the sense that all those cats really are happy to be able to take back an old friend and i'm all for it. but the cherry is that tugger is being Really Interestingly Acted here - he leads cassandra closer so she can reach out to grizabella, but tugger himself stays behind with this sort of blank expression over him. even those cats i mentioned before - jennyanydots and bombalurina - get the moment to hold grizabella's hands and smile and encourage her on. tugger doesn't do that.
grizabella doesn't touch every cat, granted, but even those she doesn't touch are reaching out to her, which is pretty much as good as. they all do enough of that sort of implied gesture throughout the musical that it shows it's affection and acceptance all the same whether or not physical contact is made, like for example old deuteronomy's greeting and the moments before the jellicle choice; the first one's posed similarly to grizabella's return, everyone's trying to touch old deuteronomy, but they're perfectly fine with sort of just reaching out and being reached out to (note mr mistoffelees and bombalurina). in the second one it's even sillier because both munkustrap and old deuteronomy could clear the like 10cm of distance between them, but the reaching and willingness is more than enough for that mutual understanding to come between them. basically intent > result (side note: this is not a good rule for life outside of the cats musical).
tugger doesn't reach out. doesn't try to get any closer than he already got and stays in the shadow behind the rest, just watching her go for a bit before he dips again.
with the way he's squashed behind asparagus jr here i can't tell if he's bowing or nodding or what, but i think it'd be really funny if he was just trying to make himself shrink a little. like hanging his head nope i'm not here don't look at me goodbye. so completely contradictory to his usual vibe it's hilarious.
it is interesting to think about though, in my opinion, that he spends pretty much the rest of the musical in the shadow and separated from the other celebrating cats. he climbs up onto the chest and stays on that platform for the rest of the show while the other cats are being directed by munkustrap to follow and then surround old deuteronomy.
it's interesting - he may be positioned above the other cats physically, but it makes him feel sort of separated if you know what i mean. there's usually this pretty clear separation between munkustrap and the other cats when they're on screen, they might crouch when he stands and reach out to him when he's talking, but this time munkustrap is just down there calling upon the vibes with the other cats, and only makes his way up to old deuteronomy's right after grizabella's gone and it's time for the closing number. rum tum tugger straight up bounces as they're going to the russel hotel LMAO.
he does hype her up as she's going up, which is also really cute. he's off to the side so the other cats aren't really looking at him, but even as old deuteronomy shows her the rest of them, grizabella's eyes linger on tugger's wee rockstar schtick and it just kind of melts me.
anyway. man may be conflicted but he's happy mum gets a retry whether anyone likes it or not. and i think that's nice. :)
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