#a lack of agency

[celestialscarlet]

Alicent misunderstanding Viserys…. Aemond not meaning to kill Lucerys…. Daemon not actually telling B&C to go after Helena and the kids….

[gibsalotdoodles]

so john has complete control of arthur’s left hand, yeah?

[katabay]

someone’s hands have always been inside of you

⭐ places I’m at! bsky / pixiv / pillowfort /cohost / cara.app / tip jar!

[theriverbeyond]

also ive been rotating how Gideon absolutely considered Wake to be her MOTHER before having that fantasy ripped away from her and like, that experience of learning the bedrock of your existence is a lie and the person who made you did not love you and did not want you and what do you do with that when you did not ask to be born. and also of course Wake's own experience as someone who likely never saw herself as a mother and whose only claim to the title is the result of a hail mary pass so desperate that it wasn't even a choice at all. something about directly contradicting agencies creating a tangle of tragedy...... Gideon cannot have a mother who loves her because Wake was not a mother but at the same time Wake can never escape the fact that Gideon is a child that she created

[swordsonnet]

three specific kinds of terror, jacob geller / working for the knife, mitski / the magnus archives, ep. 92 "nothing beside remains"

[pandorem]

Fascinating to me that Hunter in the owl house not only fills the “child soldier of the villain who switches sides” archetype but if we are going through the tropes of fairy tales that The Owl House likes to play with, is a little bit the princess in the tower??

[goldensunset]

i’ve said it three million times but i will always be obsessed with ‘ventus’ on @projectdestati ‘s darkness album bc of the way the drum improv section in the second half of the track makes it sound like a march. like that’s one of my favorite things about ventus- he’s a victim of horrible circumstances, for sure, but also he’s always been notable for how much agency he has in the face of all this

ven chooses to stand up to the darkness that used him and to absorb it once more, he chooses to take down vanitas even if it means taking himself down too, etc. ven marches headfirst into the tragedies that befall him. he repeatedly willingly volunteers himself as a sacrificial lamb. his story is sad, bittersweet like a lullaby, and his original theme reflects that really well. but this arrangement being split into two parts- one more like the tragic original, and one reflecting the moment he gets up to make a resolute decision- more fully captures his character i think. he is so strong and so brave and so determined AUURHHGH i love him

[amaranthdahlia]

its the wright anything agency gang eyy

[holisticpippin]

todd's cowboy drawing will always occupy part of my mind. I might make a better quality version later

[thevoicefromthestars]

twisters (2024) is a rom com in disaster movie drag the way that the mummy (1999) is a rom com in horror movie drag and you can't change my mind

[akechi-stole-my-heart]

akechi's "i do not regret with my choices i'm rather proud" line in no more what ifs is so widely misunderstood it drives me nuts. it's a coping mechanism guys. it's a lie.*

(*that has an element of truth to it, as most of akechi's lies do.)

like. there's this trend to take the line at face value. he doesn't regret what he did for shido. he doesn't feel bad or think he did anything wrong. he has zero remorse. but you shouldn't take anything akechi says at face value, and regret and remorse are two very different things.

there's a lot to unpack here, so bear with me as i try to break it all down.

so okay, the source of this whole misunderstanding--the line in no more what ifs. i've gotten into this before in my analysis of the song, but the context of it is specifically in maruki's reality. goro is looking back on his life and thinking about where he ended up because of his choices. he's thinking, was i a fool? did i mess up? was there a better way? this line of thinking is reflected within the game itself when he explicitly says in the engine room that he wishes he met akira sooner, but that it doesn't matter what he wants because it's impossible to change what happened.

but here's the thing--that impossible wish he made in the engine room, where things were different and he and akira could be friends? it's no longer impossible. it's literally right in front of him. but it has a catch. accepting the reality of his impossible dream comes at the cost of being himself. all his choices and agency will be stolen, including the choices he made in the past that got him here. so he's left with one last choice--accept maruki's reality, give into his desires, and lose himself. or accept the choices he made for himself, and the consequences that came with them.

so, his conclusion in the song is that any what if's and regrets are pointless. he cannot afford to regret. he must be proud of what he did and who he is. goro is terrified of losing himself and being forced into becoming another puppet like he was for shido. (and notice--him acknowledging that he was a subservient puppet before, as he does on 2/2, requires that he's aware that the choices he is so apparently proud of weren't entirely his own. he was pushed there by someone else. he still blames himself for being manipulated, but a part of him knows that what he did for shido was wrong, and that he shouldn't have done it. doesn't sound like someone completely without regrets to me.) so he has to hold onto his choices and be proud of them. he can't let himself be tempted. the price he'd pay for them is far too high.

so, yeah. it's a coping mechanism. he's forced into that conclusion by his circumstances. akechi does regret where life has brought him and how he got there and the choices he's made, but regret is pointless, because he can't change the past and he can't accept maruki's future. so he chooses not to regret. people like him can't let themselves regret.

but of course, that's not all. in a post-canon world where he lives, goro isn't going to suddenly break down and be filled with remorse. because like i said, his feelings are complicated, and he still has his pride. akechi doesn't want to admit his faults or his weaknesses, and he does still think the people he targeted deserved it. so is he remorseful? yes and no. he is aware what he did was wrong, and that it was all for absolutely nothing. but he still doesn't view the world as something worthy of saving or protecting. to him people are all still inherently evil, save perhaps for akira, so what he did was both deserved and negligible, because the people he hurt were on the path of destruction regardless of him anyway.

so feeling for his victims and experiencing true remorse is going to be a process of recovery. at the same time, akechi still has the innocent child who wanted to be a hero hidden inside him. part of him does care, it's just been so neglected he isn't aware of it most of the time. that part of him began to be reawakened with akira and would continue to be as he makes connections, especially with the people he hurt like the phantom thieves.

which is part of why i think akechi befriending and reconciling with the thieves is so important! he needs to face the consequences of his actions and realize what he did didn't just hurt evil people, but innocents too. he needs to learn to see people as beings who can change, who are redeemable and are good. that people can love him even if he's done horrible things. and as he realizes these things about himself, he will eventually start to realize that it's true about the rest of the world, too.

goro wants to believe in the world, and in people. he doesn't anymore, but he wants to. when he starts to believe in people again, that's when he'll be able to finally be honest about his past mistakes, and feel true remorse for his actions and mistakes, and be able to start to make amends. the parts of the detective prince that reflected the little boy who believed in truth and justice are still in him somewhere, he just needs a lot of time, self reflection, recovery, and help to rediscover those parts of himself.

another aspect of this is how akechi voluntarily turns himself in. i do think there are ulterior motives here, mainly that he can be the one to help convict shido. it's also self-destructive, a way to sort of end his life when literally doing that didn't work. it's the path of least resistance, where he never has to truly look back on his crimes and self reflect because well, he's paying for his crimes anyway, so who cares. it's the easy out. but it also shows that he is aware what he did was wrong and that it's right for him to try to make amends. goro isn't totally without remorse or regret. his remorse and regret literally pushed him into trying to kill himself. he's just very, very bad at coping with them, and so chooses instead to repress those emotions like he has been for years.

okay, so, conclusion. stop forcing in lines in comics and fic where akechi is like "I don't regret!" without also portraying the nuance lying beneath that line. how in third sem it's a coping mechanism, and otherwise it's a shield keeping him from being honest with himself about his past and his ruined dreams of being a hero. remorse ≠ regret, and goro feels both but to different extents and different reasons. he hates his victims, but he's deluding himself about their guilt, and once that delusion crashes down and he sees that he's hurt innocents, he's going to have to deal with a lot of intense feelings like his already existing self hatred.

akechi isn't some heartless killer who feels nothing for his victims. he's only using that idea of himself as a coping mechanism. he forced himself to become that by repressing the parts of him that care until he can barely feel them anymore. he isn't just the black mask, he is also the detective prince. he's both. akechi is and always will be both sides of himself, even when he tries so hard to shut one of those sides down and ignore it as an aspect of the truth. you can't write akechi well until you understand that. akechi is always both.

so, does akechi regret? well...it's complicated.

[wynandcore]

The cycle of loss

[starscourgc]

promised consort.

[honeybcj]

can we talk more about classically-trained ballet dancer regulus? can we talk about how this affects his relationship with gender, sexuality, and movement as a whole? can we talk about how regulus is feminized from an early age to adhere to the strict binary rules of the classical world of dance? can we talk about how regulus is stuck in limbo of dancing for love, passion, and desire while refraining from living authentically in his body? can we talk about how regulus begins to break the mold and explores radicalized movement as a means to further explore his gender and live in a body that he can proudly call his home? can we talk about how regulus shares his love and passion for dance with other people, young kids like him, that just want to be happy and free in their bodies? can we talk about how regulus dissects and criticizes the foundations in which ballet was founded, socially, financially, and politically? can we talk about regulus and his drive to make movement more accessible to bodies because dance is for everybody and every body? can we talk about how, when regulus dances for the first time post-top surgery, he has never felt more alive in his life? can we talk about how regulus dances like his life depends on it? can we talk about how regulus would do anything to give movement to the masses to save others just like him?

[logansgaar]

On the "Bucky was drafted"/"Bucky enlisted" debate, there's way more evidence in favor of him having been drafted than enlisting. Evidence that he enlisted feels very flimsy to me and mostly down to set errors and one passing continuity error, whereas him having been drafted seems far more set in stone/deliberate and plausible to me for three main reasons:

His disdain for the idea of joining the war at all. Bucky doesn't talk about enlisting and going off to war like a starry-eyed young lad who's been swept up by the pro-enlistment propaganda of the time, who thinks he'll look snazzy in the uniform or something similar that tragically many young men in that era genuinely did sign up over, he talks about going to war with vitriol. He argues about it with Steve, he's angry and hiding it well up until their talk at the Stark expo, and then composes himself after. Bucky doesn't give off pride, he gives off fear. I know the talk is about Steve wanting to enlist, in spite of his medical exemptions, and Bucky's very rational worry about that, there's also the reality that this is Bucky's last night in America for a while, potentially forever for all he knows. As a draftee, Bucky's bitterness in this scene hits a little harder, knowing he doesn't want to go but has to, and here his friend is not being forced to go but endangering himself anyway by breaking the law to lie his way in. There's a lot going on in that talk that isn't strictly only about Steve and what Steve wants. (We in fact know very little about what Bucky ever wants, other than that he likes technology and innovation and dancing...)

His 32557038 serial code. Bucky's dog tags are very historically accurate and go all the way back to the first Captain America movie where he's reciting his serial code over and over. 32 was for drafted men from either Delaware, New Jersey, or New York. (Steve's serial code on the other hand is a little nonsensical, historically speaking. I'm assuming this is because he was part of a top secret recruitment program and not part of the standard entry.)

Steve greatly admired and respected enlistees, and heavily romanticized the idea of enlisting, dreaming of serving in the same regiment that his father served in. Bucky in turn greatly admired Steve, it's very likely that Bucky just lied to Steve about enlisting because he wanted Steve's admiration. Bucky was a young man who, while he might not have been swept up in the propaganda and tragically naïve notions about the war, still had some naivety to him typical of the time. Bucky could well have gotten drafted, panicked, and ended up lying to Steve that he enlisted after all. Young people lie to people they want to impress all the time, it's a naïve and very relatable thing. It's likely that this lie then spiralled into Steve telling people Bucky enlisted, which then led to it becoming a Thing in history, since who's going to say Captain America is wrong about his own best friend???

This all makes what happens to him even more tragic, because Bucky never asked for any of it. He never signed up to be a super soldier, despite how people in TFATWS act, he never signed up to be an assassin who killed Howard and Maria, he never even signed up for the war. The only thing we see Bucky sign up for is following Steve as part of his task force. He's continually forced around by means beyond his control, both by the enemy and by his own allies. He's rarely shown making an informed choice of sound mind, and I specify sound of mind since the part of his brain in charge of decision making is like a "Christmas tree on psychotropic drugs" (Shuri, who's been in charge of his medical care for two years, says this) doesn't exactly scream "this man is able to make informed decisions on the fly".

[lionheartedmusings]

also yes q!bad is manipulative but let it be known that q!tina literally knows? that he's a manipulative liar?

i simply feel like we need to give q!tina just a little bit more credit in that interaction (and in general to be completely honest) because she blatantly answered his forest burning metaphor with "i was thinking about starting some fires to help the ecosystem myself"?

yes, she wants to be included and to be alone and feel lost is maddening. q!bad recognises that because he feels the same way, and it's obvious he cares about q!tina a lot, all tests and schemes put aside. he won't *stop* his tests, but hey... if q!tina can be useful and he can help her feel a part of something?? win win!

this is a mess of a post but TL;DR: this whole interaction was quite literally just grey, no black or white to be seen? yes, q!bad is manipulative and devious but have you considered that maybe as long as the people on her off list are good, q!tina doesn't care?

let them be morally grey together!! they both need company!!! let them be awful together!!!!!!