#also aaravi isnt helping you either

[rxttenfish]

i keep having recurrent ideas of drawing aaravi using her wife as a token pool floaty/surfboard/life vest/jet ski and i never have gotten around to drawing it but. eventually. one day.

its one of the great benefits to having giant marine predator wife of course. that aaravi and her can have beach days where miranda just chills and hangs out at the surface of the water and aaravi can sit her drinks on top of her and lay on top of her and cling to her side when miranda threatens to swim them out to deeper water. excellent.

[rxttenfish]

merfolk in general are just. horrible horrible polyglots. their brains are already hardwired for language and quick language acquisition that remains active all their lives, further helped by retaining a high neural plasticity for their long lives, and especially enjoy complex language and language-based play and problem solving. but they also tend to have a lot of their society arranged where there's often multiple different languages at play within the same area, and only really stops being so once you get into especially small villages that have below the merfolk norm for outside contact. every merfolk alive today knows at least two languages, but most of them know far more than that, especially because one of those two will be the common-technical language. its been standardized and wide-scale implemented across the merkingdom after their dominance, to help bridge the gap between these different languages, basically as a successful version of esperanto. but its a trade language, and is mostly used for information you might want to reach as many people as possible, such as laws or business dealings or public announcements or the like. most merfolk don't view it as and don't treat it as a language proper, and its not what they prefer to converse in if they have another choice, usually finding it pretty limiting and restrictive, which is why its called common-technical.

miranda, being a royal who is regularly in contact with many different people around the merkingdom and regularly expected to be fully able to converse with them to do her job, knows just. so many languages. i might be changing exactly how many soon, but last time i counted it was in the low teens. like its just a perfect storm of her brain being wired for swift language acquisition and having a job that requires it and a position that means shes constantly around people from all around the merkingdom. not to mention having to know english too, which isn't just not her first language, it's not even her fourth language.

meanwhile, aaravi knows english and a little bit of hindi, less because of her mother and moreso because of her nana... its not that her mother never used it with her, but she was. less focused on using it or teaching aaravi, let's say. nana mishra uses it a lot more and is more interested in teaching aaravi when she asks her, especially in the intermittent period after her mom died and nana mishra was able to come back into her life to help aaravi pick up the pieces (though not after aaravi kind of. got left on her own. for an unfortunate amount of time). its just also fallen by the wayside with aaravi's whole Everything Else and kind of having a hard time accepting her nana's help and kind of being terrified of her (of no fault of her nana's, aaravi's just. she's just really traumatized after Everything, alright. having someone try to offer her help afterwards, especially when aaravi's scared of getting singled out as half human and half monster, is just. it's not something she can bring herself to trust.)

[rxttenfish]

ironically i don’t actually like miranda ships that have her with anyone who’s too passive or eager to please. that just feels like a recipe for disaster for me, because even though miranda very sincerely tries very hard to make people happy and to accommodate for them, she’s also... well, miranda. she has her own very specific ideas on what is wrong and what should be done to help, and anyone who will lay down and let miranda do whatever she wants without ever raising a fuss or calling her out will quickly discover how miranda can and will trample over boundaries that she wasnt told about.

its kind of weird to talk about i suppose, because its not a dynamic that comes up in ships all that often, but in experience from my own relationships, sometimes you need someone who won’t take your shit! sometimes you need someone who’s a little combative! and i don’t necessarily mean arguments or fights in the traditional sense either, but rather a kind of boldness and a lack of fear that comes with someone who isnt afraid of you or the possibility of having a fight.

and likewise there’s another extreme to this, where someone is too upfront and aggressive about confronting miranda about her issues, because she’s just... she’s in the kind of situation associated with a very particular headspace and a way of looking at the world, and all of which involve her being told that there are people who will disagree upon these things with her, and that she should immediately shut their arguments down and refuse to budge and dig her claws in deeper and deeper. trying to push someone who’s in that kind of high control group situation too hard often only ends up forcing them deeper in, confirming how hostile and terrifying the outside world is and that it can’t be trusted, that only the high control group can be trusted.

so there has to be a middle ground between total passivity and outright rejection, and it’s the very specific space of being challenged in a way that feels safe and even secure. someone who will not walk all over you, but will not let you walk all over them either, who will question things that should be questioned but will not shove an answer in.

it’s why i don’t really like shipping miranda with any of the PCs — their primary, defining character trait is a willingness to do whatever and say whatever it is to get the object of their affections, and while i certainly imagine miranda loves to have people fight over her and her affections, i can’t see it working out long term in the slightest. there are two people in every relationship, after all, and thus both of them have to be considered as their own independent entities with their own emotional and mental worlds and needs. all too often in ships people will either treat the PCs as non-entities or miranda as a non-entity, and it just doesn’t work out for me, imo. if i wanted to just focus on one or the other, i would just focus on one or the other

all of this being why miravi actually works so much better for me, although certainly there are other ships that reach the same end. aaravi’s definitely the kind of person to immediately show how displeased she is whenever something happens that she doesn’t want or when someone is trying to make her do something that she doesn’t want to do, and these dual traits of being combative and very vocal about it immediately mean that miranda can’t say that she wasn’t aware or that she missed some cue. 

likewise, aaravi makes her wants and needs very quickly known and won’t let someone else force her away from them, so there is an alternative path that becomes very clear, and forces miranda into a point of negotiation to figure out something that can work between the both of them. meanwhile, aaravi, in being more standoffish, has the greater attitude of other people can do whatever so long as it doesn’t get in her way, which helps prevent the issue i was talking about in forcibly taking miranda’s hand and leading her to something, and how this often has the opposite of the intended effect. aaravi, in being a bit more of a token “lone wolf” type who wants to demonstrate how much she doesn’t need other people (even despite evidence to the contrary), actually helps miranda in trusting her further and seeing her as an equal since aaravi is neither trying to gain her approval and love, thus treating her as a superior, nor trying to push her around to make the “correct” decisions and be the “correct” type of person, thus treating her as an inferior. 

she’s just... aaravi, and will quarrel and push back if miranda tries to overstep, but won’t expect anything from her in turn. even if this is ultimately because of some pessimistic view on aaravi’s side and an assumption that the world is solely out to get her, it does work out in miranda’s case, sort of leading me back to my whole point of mutually compatible damage. it’s easier for each of them to intuit what the other needs and what is too far after these initial boundaries have been set, because they have an easier time seeing where the other is coming from after they actually start talking. in a weird way, they’re both already familiar and aware of the tropes that the other is playing off of, as aaravi in playing a token video game protagonist role, is already aware of the trope of the princess with the evil family, and miranda in playing a fairytale princess role, is already familiar with the knight or hero who was pushed into this role and uncertain of their own humanity or goodness. its an extra little layer of understanding where each one is coming from, without necessarily needing to elevate or suppress the other’s position.

TL;DR: i don’t like a lot of miranda ships because elevating her and treating her as a superior is just as dehumanizing as debasing and treating her as an inferior, and the best miranda ships, in my mind, strike a balance between the two characters where they treat each other as equals