#also one of the only fandoms where i love two ships simultaneously that both involve one of the same characters!!

[bit-was-here]

some kinda rough (ford)^2/fiddauthor doodles for drawing practice!! trying to relearn a more cartoony and lose style :3

(also in case it’s not obvious, ford is supposed to be sloshed in the second pic, i was gonna have em holding solo cups but it was looking kinda terrible….)

also also if you’re reading this, lemme know which ship name you prefer for them. low stakes question, i’m just genuinely curious what the fandom thinks. i personally love (ford)^2 because like..cmon…they’re both nerds…it’s so perfect (im also a math nerd to maybe im biased….)

wow that description overstayed its welcome i’ll never do that again my apologies

[narutakijune]

About ATLA Relationship Arcs

So, this is me, finally trying to write some meta after lurking in my little tumblr corner for months! Hi!

Although I’ve tried to tag properly, if you are a Kat*anger and just want to enjoy your favourite couple in peace, this might not be the post for you. I am not trying to bash characters but I do have a lot of critical stuff to say about the writing.

Anyway, you have been warned and here is my story about my personal first Atla experience: I watched the show this year for the first time, and after the end of Book 1 I decided to look up spoilers, because after what happened to Yue, I wanted to make sure that Zuko and Iroh would be ok. So I knew what was going to happen: Kat*ang endgame and absolutely no Zutara at all. Still, by the end of Book 3, I was convinced that I had read wrong - that there would be an epilogue with a different ending or at least that Aang would only get together with Katara post-show- in that Korra series or something - because anything else wouldn’t make sense- right?

….

After I got over my shock and surprise, I went online and found out about that decade-long aggressive passionate ship war and how even the showrunners got involved.

And then I really worried that I might have missed a few points. Apparently ”Aang and Katara were the DNA of the show”, according to the creators themselves, and “Zutara could never have happened”.

Another popular anti-ZK argument I found was: Why do you always go on about Katara and Zuko? Just look at Zuko and Aang! They are the hero/ anti-hero and each other’s foils, their relationship is much more meaningful!”

So I tried to find out what it was that I apparently couldn’t see.

(Another disclaimer: I love analysing stories (like many Zutarians apparently) and this will get long and rambly. If you get bored to tears when people start talking about “narrative structure” you will probably not like this.)

Talking about narrative structure, I do believe that, in order to let your story, your characters and their relationships really shine, a good basic structure is important. There should be a recognizable development and individual parts of the story that build upon each other and lead to consequences and change, until there is a completed arc - because it is all about the journey that takes you to a satisfying ending, right? So that’s what I tried to do, with my personal Kat*ang vs. Zutara take, I tried to look at the structure and development of their relationship arcs.

The argument that threw me off track for a while is that compared to Aang and Zuko, Zuko and Katara’s relationship is not supposed to be that relevant for the plot. After all, Zuko is the foil, the anti-hero, the deuteragonist to Aang, who is the hero protagonist.

This is all true of course. But then why is it that in every finale, Zuko’s main opponent (and later ally) is not Aang but Katara? Why is it that their sun/moon, red/blue, fire/water dichotomy is so obviously highlighted?

I think one reason why Zuko and Katara are paired off so frequently in the story - as opposite elements, as opponents and as allies - is that they BOTH are Aang’s deuteragonists. While Zuko also acts as antagonist and Aang’s foil/mirror, Katara takes over the more traditional deuteragonist role of confidant / best friend/ narrator.

Protagonist Aang is what connects them, although they are on opposite sides: Both need Aang because he represents their hope to save their world. Very simply put, Katara protects him, so he can make the world a safer place again, and Zuko wants to capture him, so he can go home and be safe again. That rivalry between them is already established in the first episode, even before they meet each other: Katara, who hopes that the Avatar will return (as she tells everyone in the intro), and Zuko, who seems to be obsessed with finding him for more sinister reasons.

And just to make sure, I am not talking here about the characters’ feelings and emotions! This is just about the abstract roles they have been assigned within the narrative.

When regarding Zutara’s special connection to Aang and their rivalry with each other, it makes absolute sense to stress their “same but different”ness as well, visually and metaphorically: Red and blue, fire and water, sun and moon, arguably Painted Lady/Blue Spirit, and, when you put into account their story arc, also Oma and Shu.

With this basis, which puts them together and sets them apart simultaneously, their relationship already becomes very dynamic and interesting, even before you consider any romantic potential.

And here’s another thing, Zuko and Katara also have their own story arc within the main plot. Although they don’t have many scenes together before Zuko joins the Gaang, when they do meet there is always a new shift in their relationship and in quite a few cases their interactions are important for the main plot as well. If you just look at their “end fights” at each book’s finale, there is an obvious and consequential build-up, like any decent story arc should have:

Book 1 starts with Zuko as the powered-up enemy and Katara as the weak newbie waterbender. Both are battling over Aang. At the end of Book 1, they are finally established as equally powerful fighters but still fundamentally different (You rise with the moon, I rise with the sun!)

In CoD at the end of Book 2 happens the next step: they realize that they are not different at all! But Aang still doesn’t represent the same for them and they end up on opposing sides of the war again.

In the Book 3 finale, when Zuko has completed his own (anti-) hero's journey and Aang represents the same “hope” for both of them, they do not only join forces: Their “same but different”- traits make them such a uniquely suited match that they are even able to save each other’s lives during their fight with Azula (who in turn happens to be Katara and Zuko’s antagonist/mirror/foil).

And in addition to their own story arc they even get an individual recurring theme, which also appears in every book whenever their relationship status changes: The lost mothers, especially Katara’s mother.

In Book 1, Katara’s necklace (the symbol of Kiya) plays not only a major part in two of Zuko’s capture attempts, it is the reason for their very first one-one one encounter in the story.

Their first friendly connection in COD in Book 2 happens because they start talking about their mothers. And in Book 3, their final reconciliation (sealed with a very cathartic hug) happens after their life-changing trip which is, of course, all about Katara’s mother.

Again, I am not even trying to analyse their characters and motivations within the story - there are many metas that have already done that much better, more detailed and with screenshots. This is just dry structure and tropes and themes. But I think people recognize and connect with a well-structured arc, even subconsciously, which is one of the reasons that makes Zutara such a compelling couple. They complete and contrast each other, their relationship dynamic constantly changes, builds up, falls apart, reconnects. Such a setup is the perfect playground for a lot of creative takes on what-ifs and alternative scenarios and of course, shipping them romantically is extremely tempting - think of all the possibilities! It’s no wonder that the Zutara fandom is still so active decades after the end of the show. And it’s also no wonder that the Zutarians are known for “over-analysing everything”. You can only over-analyse if there is anything that gives you enough food to analyse to begin with. Which brings me to

KAT*ANG

I just go right to the top and take the quote from Br*yke themselves:

Kata*ng was in the DNA of the thing from the start…. [Zutara] was just dark and intriguing.

If you read this quote and then start watching the show, I would (grudgingly) agree that:

Aang and Katara understand and complement each other really well. Aang gives her the chance to have fun and go on adventures and in turn, Katara is his fiercest supporter from the very beginning, something that he really needs after he lost all his people AND has to find out that the world thinks the war is sort of his fault. In turn, the journey to the North Pole is as important to Katara as it is to Aang, because it is her dream to learn waterbending properly. That’s what she literally says when Sokka & Co try to banish Aang: (Sokka: Where do you think you’re going? Katara: To find a waterbender. Aang is taking me to the North Pole.) In that way, they are friends who give and take equally and are equally taken care of. They even have the last Airbender/ last Southern Waterbender status that connects them. The few times they have a fight, Aang does something in the end to redeem himself (perform some heroic feat) and Katara sees that she is right to believe in him.

Aang has this very sweet crush on her and it will be very sweet and wholesome when Katara will return his feelings at the end of their adventure after he has hit puberty. On the other side, there is also some heavy shipbaiting with Zuko: I save you from the pirates. The betrothal necklace. June and her excellent shipping taste. But in the end they are enemies, they barely know each other and, come on, it would be too dark and intriguing! There is no real threat against friends to lovers Kat*ang, the soft heart of the story. It’s very straightforward and there are a lot of simple “the hero saves the day” scenes for Aang but that’s fine! It’s not really my kind of ship but that’s not the point, it works for the story they want to tell.

End of Book 1.

In my - probably harsh- opinion, everything you really need to know about the Kat*ang relationship has been told by this point. If you want to be really mean, already by Book 1, episode 3.

That explains maybe why many (not all! but many) pro-KA arguments sound as if their shippers have not watched Book 2 and 3 at all. The Book 1 synopsis also perfectly sums up Bry*ke’s quote above. But then Book 2 and 3 are still there and I don’t know what happened but it seems as if they somehow decided that the Kat*ang story does not need any new and lasting input. Maybe because they were afraid that too much new development and change would stray too far away from their original Kat*ang vision. But there are still 2 more books and more adventures and Kat*ang somehow has to be kept apart until the finale.

So the tension in their potential romance is based largely on the question whether or not Katara will return Aang’s feelings. In general I don’t have a problem with that will-she-won’t she-technique. It works well in books where the love interest is not a POV or in shows/ movies where the love interest is not one of the main characters. But Katara is not only the female lead but also arguably the narrative voice of the whole story! As a result, this kind of writing makes Katara look as if she doesn’t have any agency in their relationship, which is not surprisingly a very popular anti-KA criticism.

Additionally, since her dream - learning waterbending - has been fulfilled by the end of Book 1, the relationship work becomes a bit one-sided. Of course Aang is the hero and his journey is the heart of the story. But in order to highlight their special connection it would have helped to give Katara another personal agenda, which Aang could have supported in some way. She is still the last Southern Waterbender and he the Last Airbender but this is not really explored in the Kat*ang relationship. And her other personal agenda, her mother, is already reserved for the Zutara arc.

Instead, in Book 2 and 3 the Kat*ang story is somehow all over the place. Of course there is new conflict and a few romantic scenes as well. But obstacles are either introduced too late or just dropped when not needed anymore, conflict is not resolved and their flirty, romantic moments never lead anywhere- and if they do, they lead to more conflict that is not resolved (yes, I am looking at you, EIP Kiss!).

Take for example Katara’s very sudden argument that they cannot be together now because there is a war going on. We hear her saying that for the first time in the very last episode (EIP) before the 4-part finale. That is too late to have any impact! That she has these kinds of thoughts was never even alluded to before. Not once.

Or the pattern Aang runs away/ is flaky - Katara is upset - Aang comes back and does his hero thing - Katara is relieved. In regards to their relationship arc, nothing changes here between Book 1 and the finale, only the stakes for Aang’s heroic performances get higher.

Or Katara being the one who is able to calm Aang down when he cannot control the Avatar state (which, in my personal opinion, is neither romantic nor healthy). This is also connected to the problem with the seventh Chakra, that Aang needs to let go of his attachment for her. I will be angry forever with how they wasted this for a possible relationship development! That Aang has to decide to either do his duty or save his forever girl (because let’s be fair, he did try to let go and only ran when he had the vision of Katara in danger) - that’s a fantastic setup!

But no, it doesn’t have any real consequences for Kat*ang at all. Instead there were only half-baked attempts – Aang does lie about his failed practice with Guru Pathik but the ultimate reason why his chakra is blocked is Azula, not his decision to run. Aang does try to let go of Katara for a little bit but then Azula shoots him. Nothing in Book 3 shows any change in his feelings that could have been a result of his instant let-it-go. If anything, he gets weirdly obsessive - which could have been used as a side effect of his blocked chakra but – again, no, nothing happens.

I suspect the whole thing was just introduced to create temporary drama for poor Aang, but it is never explained why Katara holds him back, what aspect of the attachment is blocking him or what would happen if he did let her go. Maybe they tried to make a statement about how love is more important than Avatar rules – which would have been fine but it’s also never properly explored. Instead, as soon as that plot point becomes inconvenient it’s simply dropped like a random rock™.

Compare all that to the Zutara arc, where both characters’ feelings about each other are always very much in the open, and where every interaction causes lasting effects in their relationship. Yes, it is unfair to compare that to Kat*ang, because up to the end of Book 3, Zuko and Katara almost never meet, while Aang and Katara spend almost every episode together – of course they cannot do meaningful things all the time. But on the other side, with Kat*ang, there would have been a great chance to show a subtle, gradual build-up instead.

It also doesn’t help that the Zutara arc seems hellbent on sabotaging every romantic moment Aang is allowed to enjoy:

There is Kat*angs first maybe-kiss in the dark before the background of the Oma and Shu legend. But it does not lead anywhere. Instead, Zuko and Katara almost reenact the legend itself in the Book 2 finale as two real enemies to almost-friends, including a glowy rocks-backdrop and the right costume colours, just so nobody misses the message.

In Footloose The Headband, Aang and Katara have a really sweet dance together, and everybody can see how they almost intuitively know each other's moves. This could be a great hint on how well they will fight together in the finale. But is it plot-relevant? No, because the final tag team is Katara and Zuko! While Aang gets paired off with random rock™.

Then there is Aang’s riding off to battle- kiss in DotBS, which Katara is not even allowed to enjoy, because keeping her feelings vague is apparently more important than character development at this point. It is the only romantic moment that gets mentioned again, but in a way that sinks the former cute and wholesome ship into the deep ocean, and the reason is - Aang is jealous of Zuko!

If all of this was only done for the sake of shipbaiting, then it really went out of control at some point.

In the end, the showrunners still had their reasons to choose Kat*ang, maybe because that corresponded more to their own vision, and there are still enough people out there who agree with them. Which is absolutely fine! In the end, what matters most is how you personally connect to the characters and nobody needs to defend their personal taste. But the typical anti-ZK claim, that all the Zutarians with their crazy analysis and rambling meta essays are reaching and delusional and that they desperately try to construct something that isn’t there, is not only a very lazy argument but simply not true.

And I’d claim that in spite of the canon choice, Zutara is technically the better written relationship. By far.

[the-lone-witch-and-secret-room]

The Blight twins, codependency and fatal communication failure

Recently I talked about “the Blight children and toxic behaviors”, specifically about the tough love fallacy and how their parents get them to target each other rather than backing each other up.

In that post I mentioned wanting to make one specifically on the relationship of the Blight twins, and, well, here we are.

When we think of The Owl House and unhealthy/toxic platonic relationships, we think of the one Amity has with the twins in the earlier episodes, or Eda and Lilith, or the one the Blight kids have with their parents. I’m pretty sure very few people would look at these words and think of Edric and Emira… but it’s true nonetheless. The twins are raised in a very toxic environment that teaches them a lot of unhealthy mechanisms. The heavily codependent relationship the two siblings share is incredibly unhealthy for both of them.

Let’s get into why.

More under cut because hell this got long.

Who am I without you?

The Blight Twins always show up as a unit. They’re a set of two, who share the same track and are involved in the same shenanigans.

We never see them separate from each other in the show. Not a single time.

Their mother picks their matching outfits, according to Dana, because she likes her kids to be “color-coordinated.” They’re supposed to always look similar.

To Amity, they’re a united front—we don’t get to see her relationship to them separate from each other, we only get her relationship with “the twins.”

As far as I’m aware we’ve never gotten art from Dana featuring just one of them. They’re also often treated as a pair by the fandom (outside of their respective ships, that is), showing up together and showcasing very similar behaviors in fics, showing up together in fanart, etc.

We don’t have much content of just one of them with Amity (or anyone else that’s not their romantic partner).

You also don’t generally see them disagreeing a lot in fan content, which is interesting. Despite being two separate characters, they don’t get to actually be separate from each other a ton.

The main difference you see in their portrayal is in Emira being treated as the more responsible older sister, while Edric gets treated as more goofy (and a bit of an idiot), both in the show and fanon content. But that’s essentially it.

The twins are the twins. There’s no “just Edric” or “just Emira”. They don’t seem to exist without each other.

Their united front is both their greatest strength and their weakest link. They likely experienced a similar abuse as the one Amity went through, but they always had each other to lean on instead of enduring it alone. And while it definitely helps them a ton that they have each other, it also results in an unhealthy amount of codependency. Edric and Emira ONLY ever had each other. Their relationship with Amity is pretty bad and outside of that almost nonexistent up until Lost In Language, mostly used to hurt each other. Edric is always with Emira and Emira is always with Edric and there is no one else they can fall back on. Their most important relationship, the one with each other, is simultaneously the only one they have, one that they desperately clung to for a very long time. They don’t have any friends that we’re aware of.

Both Emira’s and Edric’s worst fear is born out of this. Despite being completely opposite fears, they stem from the same basic issue. In Enchanting Grom Fright, when they talk about their worst fears, Edric says “Being alone forever.” while Emira says “Being stuck with you forever.”

There is so much characterization in those two little sentences.

Edric has a fear of being alone because he’s always around Emira. He doesn’t know what it’s like to be alone, and he doesn’t want to find out. He doesn’t know who he is without Emira. This is somewhat subtle in the show, but she’s shown to be the more responsible of the two, preventing her brother from eating snow and being bitten by a bat. Edric looks to Emira for guidance, and his fear of being alone might stem from him not thinking himself capable of taking care of himself. Emira is smart and knows what she’s doing, and so Edric always runs after her. Even just entertaining the thought of being without her, without anyone to guide him, scares him so much that he proclaims it his worst fear. He likely leans on Emira a ton.

His desire to to lean on other people because he thinks himself incapable of handling issues himself comes with the possibility of him opening up easier, to the extent of oversharing, doing it so much that it becomes overbearing for Emira. But even if he can open up about some of the fears he has related to not meeting their parents expectations, he can’t really communicate the issues he has that involve Emira, because open communication about their issues is something they generally struggle with (see the point about lack of communication further below). Edric is under the impression that he needs someone else because he’s never been without Emira and doesn’t know what it’s like to exist without her. And as long as he has someone to lean on, he never has to find out if he’s truly as incapable as he thinks himself to be. His refusal to let go of her fuels his fear further—the tighter he holds on, the scarier the thought of letting go becomes.

Emira doesn’t know who she is without Edric either, and that’s exactly the reason she wants to break out of that dynamic so desperately. She doesn’t want to be nothing but someone’s twin for the rest of her life. She wants to just be herself, not have all her interests linked to her brother, for people to stop mentioning her only in the same sentence as Edric. She’s had enough of the matching. What Emira really wants is independence—from her brother, and, to a larger extent, her parents and their control.

Edric leaning on her as much as he does makes Emira feel responsible for him, and she struggles to let go of that because she doesn’t want to hurt him—but the tighter he holds on because he believes he needs her, the more overwhelmed Emira feels by her brother and the responsibility she holds for both of them.

Emira loves Edric, but she’s his sister, and can’t provide him with emotional support 24/7. Spending all day handling someone else’s issues can be pretty draining, especially when you struggle to share the ones you yourself have.

With Emira’s longing for independence comes a refusal to lean on anyone, especially on Edric, because she can’t at the same time let herself be vulnerable and need his support while also wanting to break out of their current dynamic. So Emira doesn’t talk about her issues, she doesn’t cry, she doesn’t lean on anyone. Emira is independent and strong and she doesn’t need anyone, especially not Edric.

It likely started out as them leaning on each other, but where Edric started to become too dependent on Emira always being there, Emira started growing increasingly overwhelmed and pulling back, catching them in a vicious circle of him trying to hold on tighter in order not to lose her, which causes her to draw back further.

To be clear:

a) Emira is not a terrible person for wanting to be away from Edric. What she said hurt him and came across as callous, but what he said harmed her too, even if the “why” that I just explained isn’t as blatantly obvious in the show. Edric isn’t a terrible person for relying on Emira so much, either. Neither of them are inherently malicious in any way, even if they do hurt each other. That they have to deal with these issues in the first place is rooted in the abuse they experienced, specifically in their parents treating them as a two-part set rather than two separate people their whole life.

b) I think it should be clear now why Edric’s behavior is toxic, but I want to address that Emira’s behavior is also an issue. While her desire for independence in itself is normal and healthy, she’s striving for a toxic kind of independence where she doesn’t need anyone anymore, which wouldn’t be good for her either.

Everyone needs to rely on other people sometimes, and if she doesn’t allow herself to, it’s going to cause some serious damaged in the long run. The most reliable relationship she had, the only support system she has, falls victim to her desire to be away from Edric… and only after she is she’s going to realize just how much she needed him, needed anyone to be there, too.

I think it’s very interesting that Edric’s and Emira’s issues are essentially inverted—they have the same root, but their problems are the exact opposite.

Edric is Emira’s mirror image.

This is also shown visually. With the matching clothes and identical dominant features (eye and hair color), they look extremely similar. Their beauty marks are what makes them into a mirror image rather than just looking identical, because they’re on opposite sides of their face. Emira’s is on her right cheek, Edric’s on his left. If they face each other, the marks mirror each other perfectly.

They had the same thing in the concept art I’ve seen of them too, but it was with identical earrings on opposite sides rather than beauty marks.

Caged Freedom

I couldn’t find a way to somehow smoothly fit this into the overlaying topic, but it’s an important part of the reason for their communication issues I go into below, and also just something that I wanted to go into, so take it or leave it.

The twins appear extremely confident, seem like they always get what they want (Amity even resents them for “getting away with everything”), but they really, really doesn’t. Sneaking out of school is the only way they can have the slightest bit of normalcy and freedom and control over their life, and Edric and Emira cannot be caught or it will come back to bite them—the reason they wanted to punish Amity in the first place is that she told on them for skipping, getting them in trouble.

Even within their “rebellion” against their parents, there’s a set system Emira and Edric have to operate within—matching clothes, perfect scores, not doing anything that could get back to their parents or harm the family reputation. Despite skipping school, they both maintain excellent grades. It’s said in Adventures in the Elements, Amity is even trying to beat their best score on an exam.

It’s a careful, calculated kind of resistance, not one that includes them openly opposing their parents. They do things their parents wouldn’t like, they tread lines, but they’re being smart about it, in hopes it will never get back to their parents. Even their limited freedom is caged in that way.

Despite seeming as confident as they do, they’re too scared to talk back to their parents. They cause exactly the kind of trouble that they know is possible to get away with without putting themselves in harm’s way. Going further, openly calling their parents out for how they’re being treated, would be dangerous, and so they don’t. They operate within the system and follow it as much as they have to in order to be able to push the boundaries even slightly.

Their endless confidence, their apparent fearlessness, is just another illusion of theirs.

They wouldn’t need to get back at Amity for telling on them if their behavior was just a huge “fuck you” to their parents. But they do, because their parents aren’t supposed to know. They’re scared, even if they’d never admit that.

Emira and Edric target Amity as a way to cope with the treatment they receive from their parents, which they to an extent blame on Amity (I’ve gone over this more in-depth in the toxic behaviors post I linked above).

Hurting Amity in hopes she won’t tell on them again seems safe in a way that actively calling out their parents behavior could never be.

Lack of Communication

Edric and Emira both have trouble communicating their feelings in a healthy way, and instead of open communication and talking things through they revert to backhand comments and punishment.

They grown up believing that severe punishments are necessary, “tough love” used to help someone improve as shown (and literally quoted) in Lost In Language in regards to Amity. That’s also something I go into my other Blight sibs post.

Regarding the backhand comments, let’s look at their worst fears in Enchanting Grom Fright again. As explained above, Emira’s “being stuck with you forever”-fear is a shitty attempt at trying to get across that she’s unhappy with never getting to be apart from Edric to just be herself. Edric’s “being alone forever” brings up a huge fear of his, especially of being abandoned by Em, which, regarding her worst fear, is justified.

Both of these fears are extremely understandable, and they don’t necessarily have to be at odds with each other—Emira just wants to not feel overwhelmed by Edric, and figure out who she is, and she doesn’t have to completely abandon him to achieve that, even if it’s something she might think she wants now. Edric has to find a way to be able to rely on himself more because Emira can’t always be around him, but he can still maintain a close, positive relationship with her, and would absolutely be able to make other friends that could support him.

What them voicing these fears is, for both of them, is a desperate cry for help, for change. Edric wouldn’t be bringing this up if there wasn’t a part of him that desperately wants to talk to Emira about this, and in the same way Emira wouldn’t have said her fear if she wouldn’t want it too. But the issue is that the twins don’t actually communicate. They put these huge things out there, validating the other’s worst fear with what they say. And then they don’t talk it out. These sentences just hang in the air between them, and then they move on like nothing happened, both anxious and hurt.

And this is because the Blight family in general doesn’t communicate. As mentioned before, the twins don’t dare to talk back to their parents, they do things behind their backs and hope they won’t get caught. They don’t communicate with Amity, and despite Edric and Emira being the closest person the other has, they don’t really communicate the issues in their relationship with each other either, because they don’t know how. This is not a skill they were ever taught, because talking things through like that requires them to be extremely vulnerable. To acknowledge what their worst fears are and why, that they might have gone too far or might have been wrong about some of the things they said, and therefore admit to not being perfect.

But Blights are required to be perfect, and Blights aren’t wrong—if others don’t see things your way, you make them. If others don’t act the way you want them to, you punish them. Tough love to help them grow and “encourage” them to make the “right” decision.

There’s no room for open communication in an environment that sees vulnerability as a shortcoming, and admitting mistakes as a weakness. If neither party is willing to take the first step, communication withers and dies, and the issues go ignored as they grow. Admitting there’s an issue in the first place, and that it might partially be your fault, is considered backing down. And Blights don’t back down. They can’t.

If you back down in business, let others convince you into a bad contact, you’ll never be successful. Worst case: it might be the end. And so you don’t back down. You never do. Blights don’t lose an argument. The other person has to break and back down first.

But that can’t work when both people involved were raised with that mindset. So Emira doesn’t make the first step, and neither does Edric, and aside from their backhand comments that never lead anywhere, they just suffer silently as their relationship disintegrates without as much as their acknowledgement of it.

For Edric, there’s also the issue that bringing up his fear might possibly drive Emira further away, knowing her fear. He doesn’t want to make her angry, and doesn’t want to fight with her, because it might lead to him losing her, which is exactly what he so desperately wants to prevent.

I can’t remember which post brought it up, but one post I read a while back also addresses how despite admitting that her behavior was wrong, we never hear Amity say “sorry” to Willow. Because if there’s one thing the Blight family does even less than admitting mistakes in the first place, it’s apologizing for them. Open communication is weak. Apologizing is weaker.

In summary: There needs to be a balance between depending on yourself and still being able to ask others for support when you need it, and Emira and Edric are currently sitting on opposite ends of the same issue. Both of them need to move more towards the middle. What one of them so desperately wants is what the other needs to recognize.

Emira realizes that she needs space from Edric, and because Edric doesn’t recognize it, he’s the one that needs space from Emira more. He desperately needs to realize that clinging to each other the way they currently are isn’t healthy.

Edric realizes that he needs support from other people, and that’s something Emira denies for herself that she really needs to realize.

They both have half of the solution to their shared problem, but their difficulties communicating the issues within their relationship properly prevent them from finding a healthy solution together.

For everyone that’s incredibly sad now (myself included): I cover these topics in several of my fics.

Most prominently, Locked Out, where I’m currently beginning to explore the Blight twins and their different mindsets further.

Most recently, Sleight of Hand, a collab fic I did with my friend @lexa-alycia, where, among other things, the twins have a long overdue conversation regarding the things said in Enchanting Grom Fright.

But also 6/8 of my currently posted Owl House fics (not counting another additional two that also do and are done but haven’t been posted yet) give focus to at least one of the Blight twins if not both, so yeah I have plenty of twins content on my profile for anyone that wants XD

Next up, probably (because I just do not want to be done with this apparently): a post regarding Vinem and Jerbric and why these relationships would work and be extremely beneficial for everyone involved.

[gyroshrike]

Tell me why you love Gamtav; give me a whole rambling essay if you can. I like seeing people excited over the things and ships they like!

Oh, are you sure you want this? Do you really want to open Pandora's Box? Are you ready for the amount of rambling I can do about GamTav? How much time do you have? Because this is going to be a doozy. I haven't even started writing it and I can tell.

And before I get into it, people gotta know that most of this is based off of pre-murderstuck Gamzee

What do I like about GamTav? What do I like about GamTav??? One of the things that plays into me loving this ship so much is how much I love Gamzee and Tavros as individuals. Whenever I start reading a new piece of media, without question my favorite characters are almost always the really, really nice ones. Boku no Hero Academia? Kirishima. Anohana? Poppo. Legend of Korra? Bolin. And in the beginning of Homestuck, Gamzee and Tavros are just really, really NICE.

Oh, well, Gamzee is really, really nice. When we first see Tavros, he’s being a little shit to the kids, but that's because he was intentionally trying to troll. But once we get into Act 5 and we see Tavros interact with his friends, we realize he's generally a really kind person. His conversations with Nepeta, Gamzee and Aradia are all really sweet. His pesterlog with Vriska, which is the first one we get to see after he is revealed to us as a character, immediately paints a picture of him as someone struggling with his self-esteem and someone who is trying really hard to build himself up as a person. Way to fuckin’ endear me to a character IMMEDIATELY.

For most of the early comic until Act 5, we see all the trolls trolling the kids and even talking shit back and forth to each other. Gamzee was one of the first trolls who we see be purely sweet and supportive to his friends. His first pesterlog after we’re introduced to him is with Karkat and Karkat does nothing but talk shit. xD He does his usual song and dance of saying just the absolute worst things possible in that Karkat way of his and Gamzee just laughs and nods and basically says, “Yeah brother, you go, I love you, you're my best friend.”

We see Gamzee talk with Equius and we already know at this point that Equius is weird, but Gamzee is so jazzed to be talkin’ with his friend. He's just so supportive of Equius and even when Equius tells Gamzee that he must stop doing soper, Gamzee just says, “Okay, sure, you got it, I trust what you're telling me because you're my friend.” Now Equius is not actually ready for Gamzee to listen to him and backtracks and is like, “Wait, no, you don't have to listen to me, let's roleplay instead,” and Gamzee's like, “I don't know how to roleplay, but I'll try for you bro.” He’s just really fucking cute???

Short version: When we meet them, Tavros is someone you want to root for and Gamzee is just the nicest guy on the planet.

Gamzee loves his friends so much and from early on it's made apparent that he wants to love and support them, and would honestly do a lot for them even if he doesn't know what he's doing.

Also along with just being a generally sweet guy Tavros is the nerd archetype I love? He loves the troll equivalent of Pokemon and card games and other things like that. Also he just really loves animals? And I always love the characters who love animals. It's a really big weakness I have. Not to mention, talking with them? That's so COOL? So badass??? Like, UM???? He could control them, but he doesn't like forcing them to do bad things against their will. (Going off of how when suggested he control the imps to defeat them, but feels like that would be unfair/mean.)

SPEAKING OF THE IMPS. Of the twelve trolls, Tavros and Gamzee are the two of them who BEFRIENDED their imps. Isn't that so fucking rad????? They both started off fighting them at first, but then they both later mention that they are able to chill with their imps instead. Gamzee shares pie with them and Tavros communicates with them using his powers. I freaking LOVE that parallel. When I first noticed it I almost keeled over. See, I'm also a sucker for characters who like to attempt peace before conflict, so of course I'm going to love that both of them made friends instead of enemies.

So Act 5 Homestuck has already set me up to basically completely love these two characters. Now, I am a really big shipper. In almost every piece of media I go into I generally come out with ships and that's a big way that I engage with fandom. Now Homestuck, I actually didn't ship that much at first when I first started reading, which is pretty strange for me. I think I just kind of let the ships fall into my lap up until that point. I know my brain had really enjoyed the ideas of Karkat and Terezi, Dave and Terezi, and had even teased inklings of "What if?" and "Oh, I like them," about Rose and Kanaya. But for the most part I wasn't really into Homestuck for shipping at first.

The concept of GamTav, or PBJ as it was more commonly referred to then, was introduced to me by my friends. I had two irl friends who were reading the comic with me and they were ahead of me by some decent amount of pages at the time. At one point they started making references to PBJ and really liking PBJ and I was a little confused because I didn't quite know what they were referring to at first. I learned pretty soon that PBJ was Gamzee and Tavros and I remember being really excited for the ship because it was the first time I'd seen my friends get that excited for a ship. Which is really funny because now in the twilight years of the Homestuck fandom, of the three of us, I'm the only one gripping white-knuckled onto GamTav and breathing it like my life depends on it, while the other two have moved on to much different things. If I'm being honest, I'm pretty sure one of them doesn't even really like Gamzee that much anymore, but respects how much I love him and lets me rant and rave to her about him whenever I want.

It wasn't long after that that I finally got to the infamous "Make out a little" conversation between Gamzee and Tavros. I read the pesterlog and suddenly everything I had seen and heard from my friends made sense. I mean, not that I'm saying that's the ONLY reason GamTav makes sense. I just mean I understood what my friends specifically were talking about. Of the pesterlogs we've seen between them before that, Gamzee and Tavros obviously had a decent friendship. I'm pretty sure in the comic Gamzee was the first person to have a pesterlog with Tavros who is genuinely nice to him. (And this is conversation happens directly after Tavros’ conversation with Vriska, so it’s a wild contrast.) So as a friendship, I was already super down with Gamzee and Tavros-- you know what? Now that I think about it, I feel like I remember in [S] Make Her Pay being disappointed that Gamzee and Tavros were fighting alone and not with each other. Because a lot of the other trolls had paired up to be cool duos, you know? We had Karkat and Terezi, Feferi and Sollux, Nepeta and Equius, and I think I remember being bummed that Gamzee and Tavros weren't paired up. So I, at the very least, think I wanted things for these two even if I hadn't stepped into the realm of actually shipping them yet. I don't remember, this was YEARS ago.

Anyway, the infamous makeout conversation happens, and I'm sold hard for life. I have a lot of other Homestuck ships that I'm into and I enjoy, but none have ever, ever, ever, ever come close to GamTav.

I realize that I've written so much and I still haven't gotten to the meat of why I like them.

So I like ships where the parties involved are best friends. I love it when the characters in a ship are bros who love hanging out, who love doing silly things together. That awesome video "What your favorite Homestuck ship says about you" had me dead to rights. Called me out so hard. My ideal ship dynamic is "being stupid together"? Way to come for the throat. That's exactly it. At their core, Gamzee and Tavros are one of the funnest bro combinations I have ever seen. And what makes them so fun is both of them are huge dorks. HUGE dorks.

When we first meet Gamzee, he stares off into the colors of his miracle modus while making the most ridiculous face, tries to unicycle but just fuckin' pieruettes right off if it because his legs are too short, and just straight up reaches into his modus with his bare hands. Don't even get me started on how he scares himself with his own horns. That shit kills me.

We've already talked about how Tavros is a huge nerd, so that's covered. But like… have you heard him rap? This guy just gets so into it and has so much fun while simultaneously sounding so silly. He's flirty and awkward and ridiculous and has this shit eating grin on all the time.

They are those two friends who get up to shenanigans where everyone else around them just kind of shakes their head and thinks that they're so dumb (in an affectionate way), but they don't care because all they DO care about is how much fun they're having together.

One of my favorite things about Homestuck in general is it lets its characters be bad at things. John and Karkat suck at coding. Gamzee, Tavros, and Dave are bad at rapping. Rose becomes a prolific author, but I would argue she's bad at writing when she's 13 because, wow is it a slog to get through her wizard fanfiction LMAO.

And GamTav is a perfect example of two people who just have fun together being bad at things together. There's no pretense of needing to be cool or needing to be good at something or any type of shame or embarrassment. They're just so silly and they don't mind being silly around each other and they never make the other person ashamed of who they are. We even see some of that last bit in the comic. Gamzee never puts Tavros down. In one conversation, he acknowledges Tavros' disability, but doesn't taunt Tavros for it, doesn't make it a joke, or make him feel bad. It's just acknowledged and then they move on. Then Tavros mentions that while he doesn't share Gamzee's religious or spiritual views, he is supportive of them. I am such a sucker for shit like that.

In every way, shape, and form, Gamzee and Tavros are supportive of each other and just and totally uplift the other person. Both of these characters go through so much verbally (both jokingly and maliciously) at the hands of their peers for being who they are that Gamzee and Tavros' conversations were so refreshing to just see them be unabashedly themselves with another person.

And they make each other happy! Tavros' first conversation with Gamzee was the first time we see where Tavros is purely elated to be talking to the person he is talking to. And Tavros obviously makes Gamzee really happy. They just make each other so happy! And I love that shit!

Gamzee is, without restraint, supportive of everything that is Tavros. Gamzee is the type of person who would look at anything Tavros wants to do or is trying to do and put his whole heart in supporting Tavros and telling him, "Yeah bro, you can do this, you're amazing, I love you, go get 'em, you're the best, you can do anything you put your mind to,” and I love that for Tavros.

Gamzee was the friend I spent all of Homestuck wishing Tavros had. Tavros spent so much time talking to Vriska, interacting with Vriska, adventuring with Vriska. And that entire time I was just wishing that Gamzee was there instead, just so Tavros would have someone to be nice to him.

After murderstuck, I spent years waiting for Gamzee and Tavros to meet in a dream bubble. That was all I wanted. I wanted Gamzee to have to look Tavros in the eye and face what he had done, own up to everything to the person he loved most in the world. But of course, post murderstuck, Gamzee gets everything stripped away from him that made him the character he was in the beginning. It wasn't even a satisfying villain arc! It was just confusing! I feel like I could have dealt with it if Gamzee was a well-rounded villain. But instead his entire villain shtick was just surrounded by a bunch of question marks! I spent all of Homestuck waiting to learn what exactly was going on with Gamzee and then we never got that and that fucked me up.

And of course, oh, of course, up until the very end of the series, in the very, very, very last animation we ever see, Homestuck Act 7, Tavros is standing by Vriska's side, as he has had to do since the very beginning.

I haven't read the epilogues or Homestuck 2, so I'm not going to touch on anything that happens in those series and I would appreciate it if no one responded to this with spoilers. Don't even tell me things like, "Oh, you'll like Gamzee," or "Oh, you'll hate Gamzee," or anything like that. I don't want any hints. I already got enough. I want to form my own opinion when I finally get the energy to go in.

Nowadays, I stick almost exclusively to humanstuck AU's for my GamTav. Because even if canon GamTav wasn't so sad and depressing, there are other things that make me way too sad to think about. As a bronze blood, Tavros's lifespan is going to be significantly shorter than Gamzee's. No matter the good or bad context surrounding their relationship. Even if they were the perfect, fluffy, happy couple in canon, I can't deal with that lifespan difference. It breaks my goddamn heart.

I live in a world where I can rewrite the circumstances surrounding these characters and make it play out in a way that is much more to my liking. Writing them in humanstuck AU's lets me take away all of the things that make my heart hurt and instead repurpose them for really meaningful, emotional character building arcs and that's my main focus when it comes to GamTav.

Something I'm also really picky with when it comes to this ship is that I need the core of Gamzee and Tavros' character growth to happen apart from each other. I have found that I don't like stories that center Gamzee and Tavros or their relationship as the pivotal point of their development. I don't like when Gamzee is the pillar of Tavros' confidence. I do like when Gamzee helps out building Tavros' confidence by being supportive and saying nice things and encouraging him, but I don't like it when he is the main source. I don't want Tavros' growth to be hinged on Gamzee being in his life.

The same goes for Gamzee. I don't like stories where Tavros is the one thing keeping Gamzee from doing bad things. I don't like when their relationship is framed as being the one thing keeping Gamzee from going murder mode all over his friends again. I've read fics where Gamzee struggles either with murderous instincts as a troll or mental health as a human and Tavros is one of the only things that keeps him from going off the deep end. I don't like that. I want Gamzee's growth to be primarily on his own or at the very least not supported by his romantic partner. Of course, I love it when Tavros is there when he needs him to hold him or soothe him or say kind things or help him through his struggles. I'm not saying I don't want Tavros to comfort him at all or ever, I just don't want Tavros to be his sole anchor.

I just love idiot best friends in love.

Oh, OH! ALSO. Gamzee doesn’t give a FUCK about the hemospectrum. One of the first things he says to Equius is how he doesn’t get it, how he’s not better than anyone else, how he doesn’t even know how to ACT better than anyone else. How am I not supposed to love that?

Opposite sides of the hemospecturm relationships are so fun. I love the idea of Gamzee entering a room full of strangers and them being like “Oh no! :O !!!! Scary subjuggulator!!” and Tavros comes rushing over all happy and excited and they just snuggle all cute and gross and everyone watching’s jaw just drops.

This might sound weird, but I also think one of the things that endear me to characters is them getting misinterpreted and then me having fun drawing them more ‘accurately’? Tavros is so often depicted as uwu soft weepy boi and I love drawing him with a mischievous grin just as ready to do something stupid and get himself into trouble as Gamzee is. Equius TOLD Tavros not to go near the stairs with his new robo legs. What is one of the things Tavros does immediately? Go try the fuckin’ stairs. And he KEEPS DOING IT.

*lays down on the floor* I just… I just want domestic GamTav where they move into a nice wheelchair accessible home (modified in a similar way to Tavros' hive in Pesterquest) and Gamzee massages Tav's back when it aches and tells him he's the light of his life and in turn Tavros holds Gamzee close on his darker days and Tavros kisses his hands and brushes his hair out of his eyes and boops his nose and they laugh so hard together that they cry.

[procrastinatorproject]

Fic writer review, thank you to @thelaithlyworm  for the tag <3

how many works do you have on AO3?

Ten? Oh no, it’s actualy 12 now!

what’s your total AO3 word count?

86,468

how many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

Grand total of 1: Star Trek: Picard - although my latest offering might branch a bit into other Trek as well.

what are your top 5 fics by kudos?

“Passengers”

“And a Barrel of Gagh”

“CMO’s Log”

“Preparations”

“Game Night”

Which is actually kinda interesting. I wrote Passengers, Preparations, and Game Night while the fandom was still a lot more active (especially in the Aramis in Space corner), so that makes sense. The CMO’s log has had chapters added every few months, giving it probably the most exposure of any of my fics. Barrel of Gagh, though? I think I’m gonna attribute that to Thimblerig turning it into a truly, TRULY brilliant piece of podfic. Also the fact that it’s whump involving a character played by Santiago Cabrera. ‘tis A Thing..... :D

do you respond to comments, why or why not?

I really try to! I love talking with people in the comments and just... thanking the people who found the time and energy to leave comments. But especially in the last few months I have gotten very bad at keeping up with the comments and now there’s about two dozen that I have neglected to reply to for a painfully long time 🙈

But I will get there! Because I love that kind of interaction!

what’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

So far, none of them have had angsty endings. Angsty middles, yes, but not endings. I’m just a sucker for everyone being happy in the end. Or at least on the way to being better, and supported and cared for on that way.

do you write crossovers? if so what is the craziest one you’ve written?

I haven’t yet, but I’m definitely not opposed. One of the threads of my 200k unpublishable whump scenes takes place in a continuity that has existed in my daydreams for... I wanna say six years at the very least, probably longer. It’s mostly straight-up Star Trek, but with the twist that it involves the Wraith, the telepathic, hive-minded alien race from Stargate: Atlantis that suck the life force out of you with their hands? Or, well, at least a variation thereof.

I once typed up the world building for that particular setting and it took me three hours to try and make it all make sense. So it’s... involved. But not necessarily “crazy”. And I’m not sure I’m ever actually going to publish any of the stories I have set in it (not least because that would envolve finishing any of them and bringing them into a form that is interesting to read for anyone but me...)

have you ever received hate on a fic?

Nope.

do you write smut? if so what kind?

Hm, not yet. I do enjoy reading smut, but only under very specific circumstances. I think I may eventually try my hand at smut, but the inner prude is still very strong. Writing about Rios and Xyr making out (which, honestly, was really tame, all things considered) made me melt in a puddle of blushing embarrassment, so full-on smut is probably beyond me at the moment. One day!

have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I know of. Though litigating that in a fandom like ours would be... tricky. ST:Pic is way too small to steal stories outright. But similar or the same ideas pop up all the time. And it’s a complete coincidence. Reading the book that recently came out and that has a kinda similar setting to a lot of my stories (pre-season 1, early in Rios’s history as captain of Sirena, dealing with original characters, holo shenanigans, friendship with Raffi, etc.), I was struck by just how many elements, both scenes or story beats and little details, were similar to things that have cropped up in my writing. And it is entirely coincidental, because I am beyond certain that the author doesn’t read fanfic. Just... for legal reasons. Not to mention I wrote a bunch of the things I saw parallels to while the book was already in production, and some of them are only in my drafts.

So there is a ton of convergent evolution going on in this particular section of the fandom, and trying to litigate who came up with certain plot ideas or character beats when would be a sysiphean disaster. Some things are clear and whenever I use any of them I give credit where I can, but people will have very similar ideas. It just happens. So no, I haven’t had either a full-on story or “an idea” stolen, and I might change my tune if it ever does happen, but so far, I’m trying to practice equanimity, so I’ll be better at it should I ever need it.

have you ever had a fic translated?

Sadly no. My dad keeps complaining that all my fic is in English so he can’t read any of it, but honestly? I’m kinda glad for this very convenient excuse. Maybe if I ever feel like I want to practice my interpreting skills, I will give translating the stories into German a shot. We’ll see. Otherwise, if anyone feels inspired: Have at it! Just let me know, okay?

have you ever co-written a fic before?

Not quite. I have a draft of off-the-cuff worldbuilding that I wrote on Discord with @curator-on-ao3 and that I would love to turn into an actual short fic (letters from a conference on holo-ethics), but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

what’s your all time favorite ship?

I don’t really do shipping.

what’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

I WILL NEVER ACCEPT DEFEAT!!!! One day, I will write the next installment of Star Trek: La Sirena! I have so many ideas for that continuity and those characters. I’m not going to abandon them!

what are your writing strengths?

Hmmmmm. Probably detailed worldbuilding? Ask me something about, say, a technological or cultural aspect of Star Trek and chances are, I have thought about it in the past or will come up with three different sets of intricate lore within half an hour. (Things like... the architecture of San Francisco, or Will there still be taxi drivers? or the treaty between IKEA Intergalactic and the Borg Collective, or the Universal Translator, or Emergency Services or Why There Are Very Few Ambulances On Earth Anymore etceterah etceterah...)

I’m also good at slapping together off-the-cuff plot ideas (if, say, you need an explanation for how Seven and Agnes ended up stranded on a desert island, I could probably give you three different scenarios pretty quickly. Just don’t ask me to make them poignant or actually write them.

I’m also very, very good at beginnings.

what are your writing weaknesses?

Everything that isn’t a beginning. Especially endings, or rather: finishing something, but also just... keeping momentum.

I think my dialogue is somewhat samey and not distinct enough between characters. (Also my witty banter is... let’s just say it doesn’t come to me naturally...)

And I also struggle with keeping things brief and to the point. I can write you 30k of whump covering a span of three hours, but fitting a whole story in the same space? Much more difficult!

I have also avoided writing full-on action so far, but where it has crept in it has always been a struggle and been workshopped a lot with the indefatigable beta.

Otherwise, I don’t know. My self-perception is always a little warped, so I’m not sure what other people would say my weaknesses are.

what are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

Oof. Well. I have used Spanish sentences in my fic and done the thing where they’re translated in the end note, but I’ve mostly done it sparingly. I’ve also done the ‘“What do you want?” he said in Spanish.’ It’s tricky. But I will likely keep doing it in some instances, even if it’s a bit annoying.

(It also really helps to have a native speaker of Spanish as a beta, even if it’s Spanish from a different region than you’re character.)

Speaking of regional: I’m also torn about the whole “phonetically writing out accents” issue. Some people love it, some people hate it, I’m really unsure because I’m not a native speaker of English, so I’m not even sure I’m consistent in my narrative voice’s regional quirks. So far, I’ve mostly gone with describing that an accent is happening, and only writing out when phrasing actually differs from standard English. Like Ian (Scottish) saying “dinnae” but not writing “I” as “ah” as you’d see on, say, Scottish twitter.

Though it can be a very useful tool if, for instance, you want to indicate a characters accent getting stronger as they get tired or upset. 🧐

Anyway, I don’t think there is one right or wrong answer here and everyones milage will vary.

what was the first fandom you wrote for?

Published? ST:PIC

Actually first? Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. Pretty much simultaneously, though I did write more for LotR. On graph paper, mind, with my fountain pen turned upside down so I could write smaller. I still have folders worth of those stories that I urgently need to digitize before they fade and I lose them forever...

what’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

I’m going to quote @thelaithlyworm here: I Love All My Children Equally! I honestly couldn’t say. They are different and I love them for different reasons but I love them all.

Thank you for the tag! ❤ I’ve kinda lost track of who all has done this already or has already been tagged, so feel free to ignore me! But I tink I’m tagging @curator-on-ao3, @aini-nufire, @29-pieces, @flowers-creativity, @highfunctioningflailgirl, @cristobalrios and @the-goofball. And anyone else whom I forgot or who feels inspired to do this!

[veliseraptor]

top 5 brotps?

oh boy let’s see here. okay okay okay okay. the hard one here is like...do I include things where I also ship them non-platonically?? and I decided to go with “fine to do so but it’s gotta be things where the primary interest is brotpdom”

1. Thor & Loki. Look, I had to. I just...there’s a lot there, there’s a lot there, a lot of it alarmingly personal and emotionally fraught for me personally, and I have accepted that about myself and it is still very true. The pain and love and dysfunction, all of it blown up to very dramatic levels - way beyond what would be “reasonable” obviously because these are characters written to be larger than life - and yet still recognizable to me in...yeah, alarmingly personal ways.

Never forget the long conversation I had with a couple friends about my childhood that ended with “no wonder you like Loki so much.” And a lot of why I like Loki so much? Has a lot to do with his relationship with Thor.

2. Jiang Cheng & Wei Wuxian. Get into a show for the gay, come out if it with a new pair of (martial) siblings, is my motto. Here we have not only the deep feelings and dysfunction going on, the relationship rupture that’s deep and difficult and ugly, but also the sheer ambiguity of their relationship to each other and what its status is, and the way that their mutual dysfunctions align perfectly to make everything between them even more dysfunctional.

I love a pair where both people are equally but differently fucked up and how that plays into the way they relate to each other and that is so much about Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng. They’re a mess and I love them.

3. Felix Harrowgate & Mildmay. What’s a brotp that doesn’t involve undertones of incest, or overtones of, actually, though some of that is the sublimated connection between love and sex in Felix’s head and anyway, I love these two, they’re having a horrible time all of the time and are often very miserable and honestly, I just have a thing for codependent siblings who mean a lot to each other while simultaneously having an excruciatingly fucked up relationship, which fits these two to a T. And just! The arc of their relationship, too!

Sarah Monette gave me, specifically, a gift with these two and their relationship arc and I’m never going to be over it.

4. Celegorm & Curufin. The terrible twosome! Two brothers who love each other very much and are also not particularly good influences on each other! But who needs a good influence when you have love and a fucked up family legacy you’re trying to live up to?

Anyway I’m always on some level up in my Celegorm and Curufin feelings and particularly how I think about their relationship developing over the course of The Silmarillion and becoming both more codependent and more strained over time. They do everything together! Including, eventually, die.

And thinking about them is making me want to write Silm fic again. No, Lise, that’s the devil talking.

5. This one was harder because it’s less obvious to me another that’s, like, on this level? But ultimately I decided to go with a current fandom one and do Mu Qing & Xie Lian. Which is kind of an outlier because their relationship is not really like others on this list! It’s closest to Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian’s in some ways, but it’s very different - the status differential, for one, is an even greater factor and stress point between these two than it is with Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng. And their relationship is...it spends more time being bad (or at least, not great) than it does being good. But I just...it is important to me, in its messiness (yes, again!) and its dysfunction (again!) and the ways in which Xie Lian knows Mu Qing very well, and values him, and the ways that Mu Qing both resents and cares deeply about Xie Lian.

This is one of those archetypal relationships for me, too, where I’m like but I want more because there is more, I want to know where they go post-canon, where they leave things at the end of TGCF proper is just a beginning.

Anyway this relationship is important to me and I wish people would do more with it in fic, obligatory plug for @curiosity-killed’s fic the reel of this life.

but this is of course leaving off a whole bunch of other possibilities, among which I could consider He Xuan and Hua Cheng, Xue Yang and Jin Guangyao (when it’s not Xue Yang/Jin Guangyao), almost all my Black Jewels Trilogy feelings, any number of dynamics where I’m not picky about form it takes but just like the character interactions...

it is funny to me that this list of brotps is characterized by three actual sibling relationships, one martial sibling relationship, and one outlier. I really went literal here, didn’t I.

[idreamtofmanderleyagain]

Morality-Focused Frameworks Of Discussion As Acts of Control

This is a post in response to a larger conversation I’ve been having with @eshusplayground. I have a perspective that I think would be really relevant to the conversation but I also don’t want to derail the specific focus of the following posts she’s been making recently.

(Trigger Warning For Abuse Discussion and Brief Mentions of Rape)

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So I’m in the Hellraiser fandom. More specifically, I’m a Pinhead/Kirsty shipper.

For those of you that don’t know, Pinhead is a demonic torturer from hell who’s design is inspired by the BDSM community. Characters who open a magical puzzle box have unknowingly given themselves away to his violent underworld community of eternal torment and depravity. Hellraiser is a film about romantic and sexual horror, and there’s quite a lot in there about abuse and trauma. Kirsty is a traumatized person, and in my personal opinion, very likely a CSA victim.

And I ship these two characters together.

So the subject matter of my particular fandom is extremely intense and niche and complicated to navigate, although YMMV (I have no trouble with this franchise, but I cannot really handle GOT or American Horror Story, for example). After I grew interested in Hellraiser and integrated into it’s fandom, my perspectives about the way we have conversations about villainous characters started to have a major shift.

I often see people have these intense conversations (and arguments) about where a particular character exists on a moral scale, with the subtext (or outright text) that if they tip too far one way or another, they can be rendered unworthy of their own subgroup of fans within their own fandom. People who love those characters or find them shippable are then subject to moral judgements.

So how does one apply such logic to a psychosexual torture demon?

The answer is you can’t.

The frameworks people online use to have these discussions do not make any sense when talking about my fandom. Hellraiser is a dark horror fairytale presenting disturbing, surreal images and behaviors in order to discuss complex and difficult experiences and perspectives. The monsters within it, like Pinhead, are more metaphor than anything.

Now, my follower count is too low and my fandom is too niche for me to really be on the receiving end of a lot of the cruelty that manifests online about the moral validity of the fiction I enjoy. That said, between the anti-kink TERFS and the younger folks involved in purity culture on this site, I can imagine exactly what it would look like. You know what they would look like.

“You’re an Abuse Apologist!”

“You’re an Abuse Fetishist!”

“You’re reinforcing sexism!”

“he’s an irredeemable torturer, you’re probably okay with literal real world rape lmao uwu”

“This is bad kink representation and you’re complicit in the abuse real men do to women because you like this!”

Now, setting aside the fact that the canon lore context of Pinhead involves him having a human soul brainwashed by a monster god to become what he is, and is also in a roundabout sense “redeemed” in canon, I think most people utilizing this kind of framework would assume that I believe Pinhead can be redeemed in the way online Discourse (tm) means it, because that’s how we talk in fandom about the villains we really like.

I do not want to redeem Pinhead. I don’t think he even needs redeeming. I don’t even see value in that conversation at all. Redemption is not a concept that makes sense for what he is, or what he could become as a character. The framework of Pinhead as a Real-World-Equivalent Human Male Abuser who Cannot Be Redeemed From His Actions would inevitably dominate all conversation, regardless of the fact that it is inherently incorrect and detrimental to real, robust literary analysis of the narrative he exists within and how brilliantly it actually interacts with male on female abuse as a subject. By nature of it’s gross oversimplification and misrepresentation, It ruins the potential for greater, more nuanced and complex conversations.

And that’s the thing: my engagement with this particular story and it’s characters has a lot to do with the potential in the narrative to examine how trauma interacts with love, desire and gender politics. Hellraiser has a very unique way of exploring that kind of subject through a storytelling aesthetic that appeals to me (horror/fairytale, gothic romance, etc).

This is about to get personal, so strap the fuck in.

I am the victim of gendered abuse, in that I had an emotionally abusive step father and sexism was absolutely a factor in why that manifested the way it did. I am also a second hand victim of gendered abuse, in that my biological father was a serial stalker and rapist, and other male abusers (or just self-centered family members) caused severe emotional destabilization in my childhood. I grew up viewing adult men as unstable, selfish children. My family endured a lot, and I came to resent the men in my mother’ life for not taking on the role of protector and nurturer when she needed them most. I had discovered the great lie of traditional masculinity: in the face of real crisis, grown men were not protectors. They did not hold together the domestic space. They abused or faltered and abandoned us. This was a repeated pattern among several men in different roles. I was often left picking up all the pieces, taking on roles as a child that these men could not. I had to have strength they did not.

My experience of desire for romantic intimacy with men and men in roles of stable, nurturing authority now inherently involves a jumbled emotional soup of fear, pain, and a deep longing that comes from a place of feminine vulnerability, a desire to be taken care of instead of being the caretaker.

The narrative of Hellraiser pushes a lot of buttons for me. It speaks to my own trauma experiences in a very specific way. In an effort to further that conversation, I’m trying to create a piece of art (a fic) inspired by the deeply personal feelings this film gives me.

For me, Pinhead represents the Jungian shadow masculine, a simultaneous mix of fear and desire, the potential for suffering and pleasure, and everything in between. These experiences are inherently intertwined for me. And Kirsty’s experiences mirror many of my own.

In other words, in order for me to get out of Hellraiser what I get out of Hellraiser, Pinhead has to be exactly what he is, and everything that he is. Which includes monstrosity. Which includes the potential for change. His place in the narrative must fully, truly embody this conversation I need to have with masculinity, which inherently involves painful, scary things.

Anybody demanding that I either denounce my interest in him as morally offensive because he’s a monster in the full sense of the word (and not just the aesthetic one like what is currently trending in Monster Boyfriend fandom), or force a traditional redemption arc upon him as if he were a real life human person who must repent for his real life sins, are essentially saying that I am not allowed to engage with this work of fiction in a way that is transformative for me. And that’s very unfortunate, because honestly, I think my perspective is so much more dynamic and has so much more to offer.

This is not just about basic catharsis. This is not even a power fantasy about emotionally transforming a powerful (white) dude, or “bad boy” fantasies, both standard arguments for villain stanning that feels like it has never truly represented me or the complexity of my experiences and interests. This is a full-on conversation and act of self expression I want to have through art about the experience of fear and trauma when dealing with men as a woman who desires men.

And I don’t think a person has to be traumatized in order to want to engage with this type of fiction. I want to be clear that my experience is not a justification for my interest (I do not need to justify myself), it is an example of a perspective that gets erased by the framework of these conversations.

To me, the framework of moral validity for enjoying fictional villains and monsters and whatever you please feels incredibly stifling to the complex, dynamic ideas and analysis that I want to engage in, because I, and many people I know, are consistently pressured to structure their thoughts with this framework as the only acceptable baseline of discussion. This is so ubiquitous that when people I’ve known have tried to engage in ways that diverge from that framework, the responses they get are outright confused or direct the conversation right back to the original framework they tried to avoid. Complex conversation gets steamrolled.

Somewhere in the conversation we were all having about acknowledging and discussing abuse and oppression, and acknowledging troubling patterns in media which reinforce the normalization of abuse and opression, some people decided that there was a very serious moral discussion to be had regarding the mere act of liking things which involve dark subject matter and complex, or even monstrous characters. They now argue that there are very clear cut, simple moral frameworks for A) telling stories and B) enjoying stories, and most importantly, that this moral framework is a valid justification for the social treatment and silencing of certain people.

A framework, by the way, which I think is actually not functionally a framework, because like the toxic American fundamentalist christian groups it’s thinking is structured from, it does not account for the vastly diverse moral landscape within it’s own space. There is no objectively consistent body of knowledge anybody is working from, because morals are derived from the human experience, which is inherently subjective.

Interestingly, no where does this have more of an impact than with marginalized people, and people like me, who want to express something deeper and more meaningful in the conversation about abuse and oppression than what this framework really offers us. To be honest, The more I see this kind of conversation making the rounds, the clearer it becomes that it’s a means of control and power game playing. It’s not about morality, but about how morality can be leveraged in order to silence truly diverse and nuanced perspectives and uphold people’s sense of self-comfort. It is a means of supplanting more convenient and easily digestible understandings of these highly complex subjects that require more intensive, thoughtful engagement, especially when it gets challenging. This kind of rhetoric absolves people of making room for complex and diverse experiences, and reinforces an (at face-value) easy to follow set of moral rules of how we are all allowed to think and feel.

The implication of all of this is that if we all adhere to the One True (alleged) Moral Framework of Fandom Engagement, then we will somehow come out on the other side with all the Good People having a Great Time having Squeaky Clean Fun. And I don’t think I should have to tell you at this point how stifling and disturbing the implications of that kind of mentality really are.

 Quite frankly, I think a lot of us are very tired of constantly speaking on other people’s terms.

[twilightofthe]

What was your opinion of the Clovis arc? People I know either love it or hate it, no in between. I generally liked it but found it waayyy ooc.

Hey anon, thanks for the ask!!!!

AHSJFLSLALK OK SO UH. Wow. Clovis arc. Yiiiiiiikes ok so. I totally agree with you on the fandom divide and I also totally agree that everyone involved in it is rather OOC for my taste. That being said, that case of OOC is exactly why I personally do not like the arc that much at all.

(Please note that my following words are MY PERSONAL OPINIONS, and that anyone is free to disagree, in fact I welcome the discussion, and even if this is your favorite arc, please consider yourself welcome on my blog I hold nothing against those who might like it)

Part of me was gonna make a short and sweet point about how I don’t like that TCW has had both of its main female characters have unwanted kisses forced on them, and instead of teaching young girls watching to tell those kinds of people to fuck off and respect their bodies, we get: 1. Just let it happen, you both must kinda like each other anyway or 2. Stay still then sit back while your boyfriend beats him half to death

But actually turns out I wanted to spend all day writing an essay so now you get this. So far I’m gonna hit four points:

the show’s constant need for Vader foreshadowing sometimes tending to completely override Anakin’s current mindset and personality he should have at this point in the timeline as well as his preestablished characterization

the way TCW gave Anakin a giant dosage of toxic masculinity to try and please the pissy movie critics who didn’t like that he cried

the role of Padmé and how TCW tries to portray her as a “strong woman” by just having her constantly be irritated by and sometimes even look like she actively dislikes her husband while simultaneously have her act OOC so they can blame HER and her actions for Anakin’s reactions and anger and overall Fall

How I think this arc is not irredeemable and that with some fixes it could be done decently— decently, not well, because a lot of this arc’s problems are also due to preexisting writing choices throughout the show

(Ok whoops this turned into a half Clovis arc rant half entire TCW Anidala commentary)

So firstly I wanna start that yes, I am fully aware that TCW is meant to fill in the gaps between AOTC and ROTS and help explain why Anakin’s mindset in the final movie is what it is and justify his Fall. Of course we need to show some Vader foreshadowing throughout the series, and in some places it is executed very well, notably the Mortis arc, the Bad Batch arc, the Wrong Jedi arc, as well as others that I can’t cite off the top of my head currently because I might have a mild touch of heat exhaustion wooo I need to get off the beach.

But it also has some rather hamfisted Vader foreshadowing stuff too. Like, y’all know the fandom joke where it’s like “Anakin: *Accidentally Leaves The Toilet Seat Up*. The Background Music: *BLASTS the Imperial March*” but like, they actually really do that. Like the time where they have Anakin take out a terrorist about to blow up an entire ship full of people and then play the Imperial March afterwards and imply he’s a “cold-blooded killer” just to defend the moral purity of the two people who were gonna stand there and let the ship blow in the name of idealism.

I’m getting off topic but yeah, sometimes the show’s Vader foreshadowing makes sense, sometimes it’s pretty forced, and the Clovis arc DEFINITELY leans towards the forced side, and when they try to force more of Darth Vader into Anakin at a point where he shouldn’t quite be there yet, it screws with his entire character.

This is particularly shown in the majority of the show’s takes on Anakin’s relationship with Padmé. Namely, they tend to forget nearly the entirety of AOTC with the exception of the Tusken murder scene, then forget even more of ROTS up until the point where Anakin strangles her on Mustafar. Basically, they take the truth that it was Anakin’s unhealthy attachment to Padmé that sparked his Fall, but then they decide to run with it where almost every single interaction he has with her in the damn show is him being a toxic overbearing dick to her and her acting like she mildly tolerates him at most and definitely doesnt respect him as like, I guess a way of showing what happened on Mustafar is in character for them???? Ugh, I’ll explain further.

So with Anakin’s aggressive possessiveness towards her. We know Anakin has possession and attachment issues. We know he’s a clingy needy whiny anxious mess who’s constantly afraid of losing or driving away the few people he has pinned his entire happiness on. We know he leans unhealthily on Padmé to provide the majority of his emotional support. We know he’s convinced himself he can’t live without her. But never, NEVER is it seen in the movies where his possessiveness turns into outward aggression towards her or this douchey pushiness. Never does he treat her like his property, like she belongs to him.

Not until Mustafar.

Not until he’s raving, half out of his mind with the warring emotions over the atrocities he’s just committed, until he’s begging her to understand where he was coming from, begging her and the child to stay with him and justify his decision, until he sees Obi Wan and sees her backing away from him, leaving him, and he PANICS because oh no no no you can’t abandon me, I need you, doN’T YOU WALK AWAY FROM ME. And he lashes out and tries to force her to stay, punish her for leaving and doubting him, and he puts that hand around her throat.

And that is supposed to be when we know he’s crossed the line, when we’re supposed to be horrified, where we know he’s lost himself, because he has NEVER ACTED LIKE THAT BEFORE.

Now how does Anakin act before? In the movies? He’s deferential to Padmé in almost every other scene they’re in together.

In AOTC, yeah he stares at her a bit creepily from a distance, he says awkward things and does goofy stuff to impress her, but he does Not get in her face. The few times he does invade her space, she flat out tells him: stand back. Don’t look at me like that. Don’t say that. Don’t interrupt me. And Anakin always, always backs off, respects her wishes. He follows her lead and lets her call the shots both on Naboo when he’s supposed to be protecting her and when she organizes the Geonosis rescue and once they arrive where she flat out tells him “I’m a Senator, I’ll handle this, just back me up”, and he’s all but just “ok yes queen”.

But they aren’t married then. Fine, take ROTS. It’s a movie all about Anakin’s issues but even then, when he’s worried about Padmé dying, he tells her he’s worried and that he can’t lose her, but he still keeps a distance. He doesn’t constantly hover and loom over her. If anything, Padmé, both in ROTS and AOTC is always the one to approach Anakin and close the distance when there’s conflict. When Anakin is upset, he averts his eyes and distances himself, tries to draw in on himself and brood silently, and we’ve seen it in Palpatine sometimes (of course with bad motives but he still does), but Obi Wan and Padmé both especially needing to be the ones to come over, turn his face to them and be like “hey, look at me, I care about you, what’s wrong”. Padmé SAYS in ROTS when he’s feeling specifically conflicted about losing Padmé, “don’t shut me out” and has to come over to him because he’s retreated into a corner of the room to scowl angstily out the window. Anakin does NOT get overbearing and possessive of her or get in her face, not once in the films.

In the fucking show? The Clovis arc, while perhaps the worst offender, isn’t even close to being the first time Anakin has been overly pushy and aggressive with Padmé, or acting like she’s something he owns, From that time in the Senate Hostage ep where he’s bugging her about ditching work and all but acting like incels texting like “awww but babe my dick hurts :(”, from the FIRST Clovis disaster ep where he’s childishly trying to screw up Padmé’s mission, to the Clovis arc in season 6

And this is where they just roll right in with their “oh so Anakin’s an overbearing, entitled douche” bit with the interaction he has with Pads and he’s trying to talk her out of taking the Clovis assignment and he says something along the lines of “as your husband, I demand you don’t do this”.

Hwat. The Fuck.

What kind of caveman-esque, 1800’s-ass man of the house whom my wife must obediently serve kinda entitled-ass BULLSHIT?!?!?!?

Like, I’m sorry, I really am, but that is just completely out of left field and not like Anakin at all. I mean to the point that when he’s an evil Sith Lord trying to talk her into taking over the galaxy with him, EVEN THEN he does not include “Padmé you must join me because I’m your husband and you do as I say” sort of domineering assholerly.

Anakin does not push Padmé around. He does not TRY to assert authority over her or try and force her to do shit. Not only because she doesn’t put up with that kinda shit for a second, but because Anakin respects Padmé; he will treat her with respect. He always has, and sometimes like in this arc it really doesn’t feel like he does.

Now of course Padmé’s response to the “I own you” declaration is “fuck you, asshole, I do what I want” and doubling down on her decision, and then decides to go even harder on the mission if only to spite her douche husband (and we’ll get to Padmé’s characterization in a bit) which is a very different kind of Anidala conversation we see in the show as opposed to the movies (also discussed later).

Now, the reason for Anakin’s overbearing douchery ties directly into an overarching problem in TCW— honestly, one of the very few issues I have with this show, but the problem is that it touches nearly the entire thing —and that is they almost completely reworked Anakin’s personality to be more hyper-masculine alpha male.

This is a topic I’ve discussed on my blog before, but the gist is that in the movies, Anakin was not the typical male heroic protagonist and DEFINITELY not what people expected from Future Darth Vader The Masked Brutish Male Power Fantasy. He was awkward, he was shy, he was soft spoken, he was clumsy around the girl he liked, he was very openly romantic, he liked frolicking in fields and candlelit dinners and snuggling. Two of the most important people in his life were soft, feminine women and he openly loved them very dearly and very gently— and he deferred to them when he felt it was right, as I’ve mentioned before. He CRIED when he was upset and was messy and emotional. And fanboys hated this with a burning passion. They couldn’t project their power fantasy onto this!!!! The Anakin critics were a HUGE part of the mob who crucified the prequels to the point of chasing both Anakin actors practically out of the movie industry in general.

The Clone Wars writers were obviously petrified of this happening again. So their solution, as has always been Star Wars’s solution to hateful fans being upset about an innocent character, is to completely rework them, hide or retcon all the undesirable qualities, and act like everything was all fixed. Now don’t get me wrong, there are aspects of TCW Anakin that I adore. As I’ve also mentioned before, they got his humor, his cleverness, his eagerness to do the right thing, to help people, his relationship with Obi Wan and Ahsoka and his men, they got that all perfectly. But the rest??? TCW’s solution to the criticism of Movie!Anakin was to turn him into an agressive, dominant, violent shadow of everything “soft” he was in the movie

Now, he speaks loudly and more deeply. Now, he’s cocky and overconfident and while yes he was arrogant in the movies, now it’s dialed up to like an 11. He never cries, never even THINKS to show a negative emotion that’s not Manly Rage And Aggression(TM). And then there’s the way he is around the women in his life. No more awkwardness or shyness, now he makes jokes about being a “ladies man” and does whatever the fuck flirting he does with Miraj Scintel even though the Anakin from the movies would have needed like every scrap of his self control just to look at her without insta-murdering her face. And then there’s how he is with Ahsoka and Padmé. He is muuuuch more of a loud brash dudebro around them who pushes his weight and is kind of controlling and their solution is just to have the both of them be Strong Women(TM) who Fight Back whenever he tries it too hard with them.

With Ahsoka, it’s not too bad because it’s a brand new dynamic and she’s a rather agressive firecracker personality herself when we first meet her, so the constant Snips n’ Skyguy snipefest works for them. For Padmé? It just means that in far too many episodes they’re in there’s a point where Anakin says something Eh and Padmé gets mildly irritated to actually annoyed with him for it and she’ll talk down to him and then there’s an argument between them because he’s bullheaded and she’s a Strong Woman. Why do I consider these out of character?

In the movies, despite the flaws, Anidala is a couple who actually tries to communicate. Anakin feels open to speak about his troubles to Padmé and her to him (for the most part, she definitely has a savior complex and a tendency to squash her own shit so she can help deal with both Anakin’s and the galaxy’s at large) when they’re worried or concerned about something and they want to talk it out, so they’ll talk it out!

The problem with Anidala isn’t that they don’t communicate, it’s that they try but also only do it by halves because they hate fighting. They’ll talk, Anakin will say something that Padmé might disagree with— the fascism discussion in the Naboo field in AOTC, the question of whether the Republic is just or not in TPM —and she’ll try and correct him if she feels he’ll listen, but if he doubles down, she’ll go “ok you know what, agree to disagree, let’s not fight” and she subtly changes the subject because she hates fighting with him. If Pads says something Ani doesn’t like— telling Obi Wan about them in ROTS, some emotional advice she tries to give in both movies —he’ll flat out shut down and be like “I don’t want to talk about this, let’s drop it” and then seek out cuddles or affection as a distraction.

And that brings us back to the Clovis arc. The scene where the “as your husband” line occurs. Anakin is trying to talk Padmé out of doing this not because he’s jealous. Maybe he was jealous the first time he met Clovis and saw Padmé being all cute n’ fond with her old flame, but this time it seems almost entirely because last time ended in catastrophe and he’s genuinely worried for Padmé and feels she’s not thinking wisely, that she’s putting herself in danger.

However, Anakin is deciding to voice these concerns in Possessive Dudebro Pushing because of the aforementioned misguided Vader Foreshadowing and Toxic Masculinity. Padmé? Is not even CONSIDERING what he has to say, is just breezing on through and shutting him down at every turn and generally acting like he’s a dumbass who doesn’t have a clue about anything.

Now, it is very in character for Padmé Amidala to be all “I’m right, you’re wrong, fuck you don’t get in my way”. HOWEVER, they aren’t framing this as solely Padmé having a goal and bulldozing her way through the situation. That’s not how they frame this.

They frame this as: Padmé is embarrassed that she misjudged the situation wrong the last time and embarrassed even further that Anakin had to step in and get her out of trouble— which he brings up —and probably remembers that he made fun of her while he did it—

(Timing out to say that THAT scene was also OOC; they once more wanted a Vader parallel what with Anakin’s silhouette when he opens her cell door and the way Padmé’s sleeping pose is identical to Leia’s in ANH. But Anakin basically steps in and gives her this condescending-ass “awww the little wife’s gotten in over her head like I SAID she would, good thing I’m here to rescue her!” bit that’s really just MEAN. It’s not like him and Obi Wan’s/Ahsoka’s teasing snark whenever they have to pull each out of trouble, he’s just kicking her while she’s already down. Really, Anakin’s reaction should have been a lot less humorous and a lot more pissy; she didn’t listen to him, didn’t trust him, and ended up in danger because of it. It’d be a surly and upset “I told you so”, not an amused one.)

—and now it seems much more like Padmé is solely taking this assignment to spite Anakin for being a dick and to pettily prove that she knows what she’s doing rather than any sense or urge to do the right thing. And....... childish pettiness????? Is not Padmé. And yet, she has the entire immature “don’t tell me what to DO, Anakin” attitude this whole arc that amounts to WAY more than just the normal response she would have to his overcontrolling dickishness

And once again, it’s because she, like everyone else in the episode, seems to think the problem Anakin has is that he’s jealous of Clovis. He’s not, not really. He’s insecure, yes, but he also knows Clovis is a bag of dicks as well, and trusts that Padmé knows she’s better than that. His problem isn’t fears he’ll lose Padmé, it is entirely that Padmé isn’t listening to his concerns, doesn’t trust him, is going into a situation they both know is unwise, and he is frustrated he’s not in a position where he can look out for her since he feels she’s not looking out for herself. And, he’s not entirely wrong. Padmé IS being reckless and kind of irrational solely to prove a point. He just goes about it pretty much entirely the wrong way, which is what you can really say is the cause and effect formula for any problem Anakin Skywalker encounters and subsequently makes worse.

And then there’s That Scene. The one where Clovis tries to force a kiss on Padmé and Anakin freaks and almost kills him for it. I’ll start off by quoting another Tumblr user on that very scene by saying in regards to Clovis: “that bitch deserved that”. The almost murder? Maybe not that far, but the initial hitting for disrespecting someone’s “no”? Yep, that was deserved.

My first criticism is that Anakin shouldn’t have even had time to attack him because why the fuck wasn’t Padmé instantly kneeing him in the balls?!?! Like Padmé is not prone to violence immediately, no, but she can will and does defend herself immediately when she needs to— her right punch knocked someone tf out once when she was pissed —and she already gave him a warning that his advances were not welcomed.

Now, I am absolutely not victim blaming. I am NOT saying it is the fault of a woman (I’d be a hypocrite if I did and that’s all I’ll say on THAT), or of anyone when faced with sexual harassment, if they don’t fight back for whatever reason, no matter how capable of doing so they may be. What I’m saying is that considering her previous behavior and personality and the fact that the show NEVER goes deep enough into explaining heavy stuff like why victims might freeze or NOT fight back when faced with harassment, I feel like showing her not attempting to defend herself at all is kinda strange.

Now, Padmé’s utter passiveness to the situation aside, we’re going back into toxic masculinity and misunderstood interpretations of how Anakin displays possession. While I’ll repeat that Clovis deserved consequences for the forced kiss, Anakin going full caveman defending his property jealous rage just. Doesn’t feel right to me. Again, I think Anakin would probs hit him and put the fear of living god into him, maybe even I’d buy the attempted murder if they framed it as Anakin doing it because he hates those who force their will on others and disrespect women, but the whole that’s MY wife and you’re touching her shite just once more feels alpha male aggressive ridiculousness. Like again, I understand Anakin is possessive of Padmé, but not like this. I’m sorry, but I just cannot see that, him fighting over her like she’s a scrap of meat.

Like, I completely think she’s in the right tho to put them on a break after he does it though. That’s well within her right.

But then onto the FINAL part where after Clovis goofs and fucks them all over and then dies, she forgives him and blames herself for everything and apologizes. And like, that part I do see as in canon and character for her and for Anakin. He doesn’t like to admit his mistakes, her mistakes weigh on her and when she fails to fix or save someone, she falls into depression and upset and self-blame.

But the fact that Clovis died because Anakin dropped him? Anakin Skywalker, who scaled an entire elevator shaft carrying two people over his back who combined probs weighed more than Padmé and Clovis. Anakin Skywalker, who’s used the Force to lift tons of debris, who’s used it to hold back explosions, Anakin Skywalker, MOST POWERFUL FORCE USER IN HISTORY WHO TENDS TO RELY ON BRUTE STRENGTH FOR MOST SHIT ANYWAY. That Anakin couldn’t pull two people over a ledge?!?!?!?!? This has always bothered me.

Like to be honest; I feel this entire episode could have been so fixable too. Like keep Anakin’s obsessive worry over Padmé making a mistake, keep the best part of the arc which is his talk with Obi Wan where Obi Wan tries to connect with him and explain that he’s not alone, all Jedi have emotional struggles and have loved, if perhaps he wants to TALK to someone about it, Obi Wan is here for him, like that? That’s okay!

Just ugh ffs, get rid of the nasty Anakin treating Padmé like a naughty dog who won’t obey him and the Padmé purposely acting unwisely to spite Anakin plot. Have the entire conflict be both of them being upset that the other doesn’t trust them, doesn’t believe in their advice, keep Padmé’s speech about how marriages NEED trust and compromise to survive, take all of Anakin’s aggression towards Padmé and transfer it to aggression towards Clovis, like make the conflict him menacing the guy if he hurts Padmé again just because he’s being overprotective and “if you won’t look out for yourself I will” and Anakin getting constantly checked for not being able to control his emotions, Padmé can tell him off for being overprotective instead of overaggressive and his possessiveness can instead show through him arguing that he needs to keep her safe at all costs. THAT can be the argument.

And if they want the Vader foreshadowing? Like real, in-character Vader foreshadowing??? Tbh, drop the Clovis beatdown, drop the machoness towards Padmé, and just have Anakin blatantly DROP the douchebag at the end of the episode instead of his hand slipping. Make him choose to ACTIVELY kill Clovis. Like THAT, Anakin taking the law into his own hands and deciding that he knows best and this guy is dangerous and has fucked up one too many times, there being an opportunity where there’s an chance to save Clovis when they’re alone without Pads, “be a Jedi, Padmé wouldn’t want this, do the right thing” Clovis might say, and we can see Anakin’s face considering, and then he just “Long Live The King”s him and lets him fall and die, THAT is an in-character Vader foreshadowing.

Then at the end of the episode, we can have Anakin lie to her, say Clovis slipped, say it was too late, and Padmé can believe him, thank him for trying. Then there’s the same thing where Padmé apologizes, and we can have a callback to the convo about trust and she adds that she’s sorry that she didn’t trust him, and when she says that, we zoom in on Anakin’s guilty face.

There. That’s how I’d fix these episodes

And THERE, I think I’ve complained about everything, I am SO sorry for the gigantic ass post and response, I’ll add a read more once I’m on my laptop and not on the beach on mobile.

But yeah anon, I hope that satisfies your question xD

Once again, I welcome discussion if y’all either agree with me or if you have any differing opinions, I know my takes are far from hot for several people and I’m curious to see what others think!

[elrondsscribe]

Azula and redemption.

So … this is going to be a bit of a mess. I’m undoubtedly going to say a lot of things in this post that I’ll end up re-phrasing later. Apologies, because this got long-ish.

I will repeat that I don’t have access to the Avatar comics, and that I’m not interested in material from them. You may quote me as saying that, as of this post, the comics are not canon so far as I’m concerned. (The same goes for Legend of Korra, but I’ll talk more about that elsewhere.)

The character of Azula is one that a lot of people in this fandom find really compelling, yours truly included. She’s clever and calculating. She plays the long game, and she plays to win. She lets nothing get in the way of her goals. She’s an incredibly powerful firebender, arguably the most powerful we get to see in close focus; and there’s a beauty to her bending that makes her just a pleasure to watch. She’s got some of the wittiest lines. And #girlboss, I guess. She’s the unquestioned leader of a trio of incredibly accomplished young girls. On some level, we have no choice but to stan.

It is also true that Ozai’s treatment of her is abusive, and has damaged her deeply. When he had no more use for her in “Sozin’s Comet: The Phoenix King,” he cast her aside without a second thought, saddling her with a title that he rendered meaningless with his whole “Phoenix King” stunt, thus sending her spiraling into a psychotic break. He might praise her for being “a true prodigy,” but clearly her obsession with perfection was something that he passed on to her, or instilled in her, or both. She also appears to have had the closer and more “affirmative” relationship with him (whereas Zuko’s closer and more “affirmative” relationship was with Ursa), and that relationship has molded her into someone who is, at her core, deeply afraid.

But as much as Azula is afraid, Azula is also cruel. With the exception of her father and master, she seems to value the lives of the people around her purely in terms of what they can get her or accomplish for her. And while Ozai may have nurtured these things in her, I also think that, to some extent, those traits were already there in ways that they weren’t there for Zuko.

Now, a lot of Azula-defenders will say that the glimpses of Azula that we see in “Zuko Alone” should not be taken as gospel truth, that we are trusting an unreliable narrator. But I argue that a nine-year-old Azula who bodily throws Ty Lee on the ground and then points and laughs at her because Ty Lee had the nerve to perform a backflip better than she could is not inconsistent with a fourteen-year-old Azula who is willing to order Ty Lee’s safety set net on fire and all the dangerous circus beasts simultaneously turned loose while she’s suspended in the air (thus endangering Ty Lee’s life and the lives of all the patrons), just because Ty Lee had the nerve to initially say no to joining her. A nine-year-old Azula who sets an apple atop Mai’s head on fire just to get Zuko to embarrass Mai by pushing her into a fountain is not inconsistent with a fourteen-year-old Azula who plays with the life of Mai’s toddling brother in Mai’s presence in order to keep king Bumi captive. And an eleven-year-old Azula who smiles while her father burns her brother’s face is not inconsistent with a fourteen-year-old Azula who is willing to throw lightning at him with no knowledge of the existence of lightning redirection and who is willing to put a bounty on him dead or alive.

I think, like a great many other people in the fandom do, that Azula not only has less empathy than is “the norm,” but also more cruelty (the two are NOT synonymous). In fact, I think that this lack of empathy and relatively high cruelty was part of what Ozai admired and refined in Azula, it wasn’t just her firebending. See, I think people who say that Ozai favored Azula just because she was a firebending prodigy are a little off the mark: if Azula had been a firebending prodigy but had the same kind of “you-can’t-sacrifice-the-lives-of-our-loyal-soldiers”/ “Uncle-deserves-sympathy-his-only-kid’s-dead” attitude that Zuko had, Ozai would have had a lot less to work with. Azula is unquestionably an abuse victim, but she is also herself an abuser: of Ty Lee, of Mai, of Zuko, of the soldiers and servants beneath her.

To be blunt: Ozai may have shaped and encouraged her crueler traits, but I don’t think he put them in her. Not entirely.

Now I wanted to talk about the cruelty issue with Azula because it’s important to how I see a good Azula redemption arc taking place. Now Aaron Ehasz may believe that Zuko is best suited to be the key for Azula’s redemption, but I disagree very strongly. Azula was also an abuser of Zuko, and I think that making Zuko the one to power her through it with Love would be terrible. What’s the point of Zuko so powerfully standing up to his father and calling him out on his abuse if Zuko’s also supposed to be the one to “save” his secondary abuser?

(As an aside: this is also my big objection to Tyzula, which is alarmingly common in fanwork. I mean, Ty Lee is arguably Azula’s most explicit victim, and the one most clearly afraid of Azula. What on God’s green earth made that ship so popular that their voice actresses ended up doing a scene in one proposed to the other?! Was it the scene at the party? Because if so, I think it’s rich that Azula’s one and only canon apology is for saying something rude but probably true, while never apologizing for that one time she endangered Ty Lee’s life and snatched away the circus career that she’d tried to build for herself.)

An Azula redemption just wouldn’t follow the same road as Zuko’s redemption did. It wouldn’t just be a matter of Azula learning that she doesn’t have to be perfect to be worthy of love. It wouldn’t just be a matter of learning that the way her father treated her was wrong and bad.  It wouldn’t even just be a matter of learning that fear is not, in fact, the only reliable way to have relationships with people. It would be a matter of learning to see people other than herself as persons and not tools to get her things. It would be a matter of learning that her own sense of inherent superiority (both national and personal) is without merit. It would be a matter of learning that the suffering of other people is actually Not A Good and that she probably shouldn’t cause it for fun.

(Plus, I’m gonna be honest, I don’t honestly know how possible it would be for Azula to internalize these things because, as I’ve said, the cruelty and tendency towards manipulation seem to be just a part of her.)

Oh, and also: I’ve heard people say that Azula should have had a redemption arc within ATLA, or that an Azula redemption was one of the many things we were cheated in that we never got a Book 4. But I really think a meaningful redemption arc for Azula would take much, much longer than a single season. I mean, it took three books to complete a redemption arc for Zuko, and at the beginning of his, he was in a much more receptive place than Azula is after the Agni Kai. And Azula has more destructive ideas to unlearn than Zuko did.

So, do I think Azula is a “monster,” whatever that means? Do I think she doesn’t “deserve” redemption? No. I’m also aware that she’s just fourteen, and a lot of things can change during one’s teen years. But I do think that Azula is one of those cases where the abused has also become an abuser in her own right, and a meaningful redemption for her is rather a bigger undertaking than some of her fans and defenders acknowledge. And for God’s sake, don’t make Zuko or Ty Lee responsible for her redemption!!

Post-mortem: Also, about the dragons: I get the appeal of the dragons as an element of Azula’s redemption. Especially after Game of Thrones, I’d love to have a functional, badass, not-dead dragon-lady too. But “The Firebending Masters” told us that Ran and Shaw incinerate you if they don’t find you worthy, which is bad news for a firebender who’s all about power and domination rather than guardianship and life-igniting (there’s a better way to say that, I’m sure). If Ran and Shaw were involved in an Azula redemptive journey, it would have to be near or at the end, just to avoid the incinerating.

[supercasey]

What your RvB OTP says about you

((I saw a similar list, but it didn't include a lot of my favorite ships and also I thought this would be fun. Sorry if any of this offends anyone: it’s all in good fun and just some observations I’ve noticed over the years about certain shippers. Let me know if I missed any other big ones!))

FUCK I FORGOT SISTER AND DR GREY

Tuckington: Chorus crew is best crew. Wash and Tucker are your all-time favorites and you're so proud of how far Tucker has come. You probably hate/love Felix, there is no in-between.

Mainewash: You like to suffer; you have an addiction to fics that involve one of these two dying. You live for the Meta and Antagonist!Wash team-up. You probably ship Doc with them if you’re into polyam. Cat person.

Yorkalina: You adore York to the moon and back, and are honestly a sucker for “goofy person meets strict person and teaches them to have fun” pairings. You have a replica of York’s lighter that you’ve never used.

Grimmons: You deserve a Fandom Grandma/Grandpa mug, buddy. You’re so tired, and you’ve probably been here since at least season 6. One day it’ll be canon, you just know it. In the meantime, you’re suffering.

Churboose: My mom ships this so here we are. Caboose is the most perfect of good bois and you’re only watching rvb for him at this point. You’ve cried over Church every day of your life. You named a pet Freckles, probably.

Washlina: You are the most chill/sweet person in the entire goddamn fandom. Seriously, you’re so nice. You don’t care either way if it ends up canon, but the latest content is still very satisfying. You’re so kind, I love you.

Sargington: You’re having the time of your life and I’m so happy for you. Sarge is probably your favorite character, but Wash is a close second. You’re chill about other ships but this is the guilty fav; don’t feel guilty, you’re amazing.

Docnut: Precious cinnamon roll who is too good for this world, too pure. Doc when he’s doing the O’Malley voice is way too hot for you. You probably have written/daydreamed about these two having a farm together.

Pastrytrain: Congratulations for being a good person. The pinnacle of “I’m staying in my fucking lane” when it comes to fandom drama. I know you downloaded the Pastrytrain dating sim, don’t try to deny it.

Kimbalina: Never mind, you guys are the actual diehards for the Chorus trilogy. Carolina is your queen and she deserves the love that Kimball can bring into her life. That hand-holding scene is now your desktop background. Probably wlw.

Tucknut: Trans with an amazing sense of humor. You swear a lot and make more dirty jokes than you should, but people love that about you. Donut is your favorite but Tucker is funnier.

Churnut: Donut is your favorite. You hate that Church is dead and pray every single day that he’ll come back somehow. The Donut arc this season had you fucking THRIVING and I’m so happy for you.

Norkington: You’re either gay or trans or both, and that’s the tea. You’re still obsessed with the PFL seasons, despite how long it’s been. Your favorite version of Wash is the PFL rookie version.

Nork: Yeah, you’re gay, sis.

Flowarge: Where are y’all??? I know I’m not the only one. You want a sitcom of rvb that’s just Parks and Recreation but with power armor. Sarge is best dad and Flowers is your other, more dead dad.

Flyoming: You literally don’t need any canon evidence to ship something; if they breathe they’re in love. Florida is your fav, and tbh Wyoming isn’t even in the top ten, but you’re too into older men to care. Daddy issues.

WashCT: People claim you’re boring but tbh you have really good taste, everyone else just isn’t interested. Knives are one of your favorite things but odds are you don’t know how to throw them. You really miss CT.

SouthCT: The wlw energy is literally so powerful in your bones, congratulations. Team #SouthDidNothingWrong, as well as Team #CTDeservedBetter; you are correct on both accounts. South is best girl.

Southlina: Not sure where y’all are at, but you’re all about that powerful lesbian energy. You probably hate York; if not I’m sorry for saying that. On that note you probably hate the PFL seasons but you’re too desperate for content to complain.

Fucker: You little shit. You are 100% involved in fandom drama but you’re thriving regardless; it’s impossible for you to be affected by everyone telling you that you’re problematic. Tucker is your favorite, but Felix is hot af.

Locington: You say “Unfortunate” way too often but I love you nonetheless. You spent the entire hiatus between seasons 11 and 12 writing porn, and you damn well know. Hell, you’re probably proud of it. Locus is your fav.

Murdersandwich: Are you still here??? If you are, you’re braver than any us marine. Modern AUs where these three get together are your bread and butter. Tuckington is your second favorite ship.

Murdersandwich+Sharkface: You unapologetic, horny motherfucker. You’re living your best life while simultaneously sobbing into your pillow every night over Felix and Sharkface. Locington is your default fav, but this ship still rocks.

Lolix: Fandom veterans from the “Felix is problematic” wars and I salute you for your service. Here to have a good time, and ain’t nobody gonna stop you. You’ve probably written/thought about a “Felix lives” AU at extreme length.

Sharklina: Season 13 was so good in your opinion and you refuse to ever shut up about it. #SharkfaceDeservedBetter. You’re probably into punk aesthetics and you’ve made at least one playlist for these two.

Chex: #ChurchGetsPegged. Tex is your diehard fav and you will never in your life let RT forget that she exists. You’ll drag her out of her grave yourself if you fucking have to. You memorized Church’s speech from the end of rvb5.

Chucker: You cry each and every day about Church being dead. You’ve rewatched the BGC no less than twelve times, and that’s just this year. Everytime you see That Post, you reblog it. You know the one.

Sheipez: If Sheila were real you’d ask her to adopt you. Lopez is your current fav by default and you live for every moment he’s on screen. Caboose is your precious son and you’re willing to die for him.

Sex: You ship this purely because of the ship name. STFU, yes you fucking do. Tex is hot af and you love that one fancomic of sister without a bra on flirting with Tex.

Sucker: Despite popular opinion, you're not as horny as everyone thinks you are. Sister is your favorite and Tucker isn't even close but you love him regardless and think he fits well with Sister.

Suckington: I know you bastards are still here. Wash is your favorite but you love him being surrounded by these energetic shitheads who fill his life with energy and fun. Sister is best girl.

Greyington: I know for a fucking fact that this was a thing. Fucking sadist when it comes to your brand of porn, and Dr. Grey is your favorite character to ever exist.

Kimbones: You knew fuck all about Ladybones but you shipped her with Kimball anyways because you're a thirsty wlw. You've probably moved onto Kimbalina by now, but we will not forget the season 11-12 horniness you unleashed on this fandom.

[purplesunrisefanfic]

Talk to me here.

Find me on AO3 here.

I’m doing TLOU Femslash Week 2020!

I didn’t know it existed until Day 2, so I’m filling Day 1 “Making Amends” with an existing fic. (Abby/Ellie, Scroll down that post for an extract and link.)

Here’s my forbidden love (WLF/Scar) poem for Day 2: Scars.

Here’s the Tumblr post for Day 3: Good Son Fluff and here’s the AO3 link. (Please read the warnings). Abby/Ellie try to figure out post apocalyptic transition options for Lev.

My Day 4: Modern AU fic features adult Riley! Very meta and filled with Easter Egg-type things right to the end. Poly Ellie with Dina/Ellie and Ellie/Riley + something for shippers of all stripes. Riley and Abby are firefighters (You’re welcome.) Inbox me if you think you’ve found all the Easter Eggs!

Day 5 was all about an Apocalypse Wedding! I wrote a short song fic based on White Wedding for this. This Dina/Ellie fic was one of the most popular of the week.

The Day 6: Hunting Together ficlet took us way back to happier times. Ellie and Riley star in “I sorta shot a rifle before...but it was at rats...with BBs.”

Links will be added soon, but they’re all on my AO3.

My Fics

I’m currently writing a multi-chapter letter/note based epilogue for Part 2 called “Dear.” It’s a long-game Dina/Ellie reconciliation fic focused on recovery and earning forgiveness.

My first Abby/Ellie fic (heavy angst, smut, slight dom Ellie) might be more sloppy than hot mess (written in an afternoon when I had two others on the go, whoops) but UPDATE: got pretty decent feedback and is now a series with a second Abby/Ellie fic (smut, Dom Abby, spanking + heavy angst)

My first fic was some Dina/Ellie BDSM times involving everyone’s favourite clueless top (aka Ellie) wanting to explore subbing for everyone’s favourite power bottom (aka Dina).

I’ve also written an Ellie & Joel Drabble (hurt/comfort) where everyone’s favourite Murder Dad tries to look out for Ellie right after David, he’s awakward and they’re cute (warning for mature themes)

Happy to Beta TLOU fics/HMU if you’re writing autistic characters/Reach out if you’re interested in beta reading for me.

If you want me to beta read your TLOU work then message me and I’ll see what I can do.

I recently offered (link to be added) so help and advice re: writing autistic characters who (like me) have sex lives. Do reach out if you want some non-judgmental input. Same goes for my other atypicalities!

Ship all the Ellie!

I now simultaneously ship both Abby/Ellie and Dina/Ellie and give no fucks.

Lev Ideas/Prompts Welcome

I’m keen to see more Lev fics in the fandom but am currently lacking ideas so please do send me your Lev-related prompts if you have any.

Smut requests for Abby/Ellie or Dina/Ellie are also welcome:

Please also feel free to send me any kink/BDSM prompts or ideas that’s you’d like to see in an Abby/Ellie or Dina/Ellie fic and I’ll let you know if that’s something I can do.

(Relevant link tba)

Luddite/Probably not online much, I check messages tho

In case you haven’t guessed, this Tumblr basically only exists as a companion to my fanfic writing, so you probably won’t find me doing much here except fic discussion and maybe reblogging all the TLOU gifs I’ve seen.

Thanks for reading this/my fics

And a big thank you to my readers, especially those of you who reach out to me or leave comments. Comments and feedback are what keep me writing! Anon is available on here so if you have feedback but are feeling a bit shy with your username on AO3, then feel free to use that option instead.

[fandomele]

I don't wanna start anything but I've seen the lack of love for POC ships happen in dozens of fandoms now and I just gotta say you can't fault people for not liking what you like bro. You could make a show full of diverse representation but no one's truly gonna care unless the characters are actually interesting. I'm black but I'm not gonna enjoy a show JUST b/c there's a black person in it. If I don't like them I don't like them and them or me being black has nothing to do with it

okay so racism tw , supergirl, anti supercorp fandom, anti supergirl fandom. long post for ts

no, it’s okay, you are free to express your opinion, just like I’m free to get annoyed at the tag being filled with Lena and Lena and Lena I haven’t watched a show that has an ace character in it, Sex Education, because it’s not my kind of show and it bores me (though I do reblog gifsets of the Ace Scene and I am so happy about it. Because I do care about ace representation, I try to promote these things and also to share so that it might reach people who are interested in shows like that and will get a kick out of it. But I’m not saying everyone has to), and I’m not saying you must like everything, but at the same time a fandom like ours simply ignoring the plot of entire episodes because… what, they only find one character interesting and they couldn’t find ANY other worth mentioning, is something I personally found ridiculous. 

And that’s kind of the thing, isn’t it? You raised a great point. If this was a part of the fandom that from the beginning had simply said ‘I like this because of my tastes, and everyone has different ones’ I wouldn’t be exasperated, but given how it actually went, nope, THEY said it wasn’t just about people’s tastes, it’s about having representation and supporting fellow lgbtqia+ fans. So good part of my frustration depends on this specific fandom and how it behaved in the past. 

For more context, it bothers me that the loudest (even if small) group of fans left watching supergirl on tumblr are the ones yelling about how Kara and Lena not being together is homophobia, and how they are being queerbaited and how the show (and non supercorp fans) is against gay people, while the tag itself is full of posts either complaining about the lack of Lena, and writing posts about Lena, and completely ignoring the amazing wlw couple there and the trans character there, and in fact those episodes with little Lena but focused on those characters get downvoted/boycotted/ignored by the fandom, and while they hate on all actors and writers if they so much as point out it’s not canon or that they are being bullies, and attack minorities, people of colors, transgender people, people with mental illnesses all day long to defend their ‘rights’. Not to mention that it’s the same group that back in the day accused people of shipping Kara and Mon El, also canon, together because they were against James, who is black, and so it was because ‘racism,’ and then turned around and hated James as soon as he was canonly together with Lena. And there is proof of them being racist as well like when they photoshopped James’s actor as an ape* next to Lena’s actress, and how Raul who played Lena’s ex also commented on that behavior. They use social issues to attack everyone and then show they don’t really care about supporting a show that actually has the representation THEY say they are not getting. 

I was bored by James and Kara. Nothing to do with him being black. I found him cute with Lena at first but then it became a bad relationship for him to keep. But if you (always a general you, not YOU-YOU anon) accuse me of shipping Kara with someone else (Mon El) only because I’m racist and don’t want her with James, that’s the only reason, and then you start insulting James like hell for being with Lena, you basically said it yourself that it’s racism, and on top of it you used his being black and the ‘you are racist’ card as props to attack people, and then disregarded him and the actor as soon as you didn’t need it anymore, and that sounds also racist to me. As well as how pretending to care about trans issues only to ignore the trans character after you stop needing it is using that character/actress and it’s transphobic, if you ask me. 

I’m not saying it’s everyone, I’m not saying it’s all those shippers, I’m not saying personal taste doesn’t count, but come on. Just admit you only care about your ship and it’s not about ‘moral’ reasons, that’s fine, but make it a social issue, and then turn around and ignore episodes about canon representation and downvote them and ask people to boycott episodes. How can you also not find ANYTHING but Lena interesting in a show that isn’t about Lena? So many choices, and yet.

 At least this is my opinion, and seems to be the opinion of all the people who liked posts and reblogged. Again, there is a lot of stuff to talk about so  the answer is chaotic, but to sum it up:

1) if you build a whole case around the fact that your fanon ship (Kara and Lena) is about representation too, about gay rights, and how much you care about it, and have spent years telling everyone else that they are racist and homophobic because they ship other things, and then you don’t even make a peep about the representation you are getting and just complain about your fanon ship, which by the way up until now involves a white, straight, woman, you are using social issues to prop a ship you like and you don’t really care that much about them outside of it. Admit from the beginning it’s about your tastes and that you just like those two women together, it’s not about a show giving you representation, and it’s fine, but you can’t have both. You can’t tell people that your fanon ship is all about representation AND if they don’t like it it’s because of homophobia, and if they like another it’s because of racism, AND simultaneously ignore everything you get that isn’t about said fanon ship.

2) the cast was attacked in the past with racist and transphobic tweets so some people, not everyone, are also motivated by them. Also really, you are telling me that all these people who like Lena but do care about social issues just happen not to like Nia, a trans woman, and not like her ship with Brainy, a man of color, and not like Alex and Kelly, and not like about the whole plot about the guy going after Nia because transphobic, there is just NOTHING interesting to talk about? Either they are using social issues to their advantage which is kinda homophobic and racist and transphobic in itself, or this is a giant coincidence, because there isn’t one of these plots that is worth a post or that won’t make them not complain about the lack of Lena in a show that has all these characters together.

3) for me it’s frustrating to get all this good stuff and then find nothing but comments about Lena in the MAIN tag, where one usually goes after an episode to talk about the episode itself. That’s how tags work in all fandoms except this one. 

4) I’m white, that means that I can’t declare that tumblr deciding not to ship biracial couples in nearly every show where there is one is a matter of tastes or is a matter of racism, it’s not for me to decide, and my personal opinion is that it depends on the person but there is such a racist culture in some places that it can’t not have a role in it. And I’ve seen people of color bring up that yes, it’s about tastes too, but since I’ve also seen many others instead bring up the issue that it’s just happening too much to be a coincidence, that every single time people say a ship is platonic if one of them isn’t white, I feel like it would be racist of me to dismiss those concerns. Because it is a trend and because the racist insults thrown at actors more than once do say that while for some people it is a matter of tastes, for others it’s definitely not just that. Just going to leave this as a little example that represents that hundreds we saw in years:

 *

edit: and

[margridarnauds]

Ur brutally honest opinion about ronan and olypme please

God, complicated topic.

So, it’s well documented at this point that I don’t really GO for Ronan/Olympe, but I do think that it tends to get shafted a tiny bit, both by the writers and by the fandom (including me). They do HAVE potential, as a ship, and actually, to give credit where it’s due, a lot of what I do with Lazare goes over similar territory to Ronan’s relationship with Olympe, as far as the conflict between duty and loyalty and love and the weird amalgamation thereof. And I do feel like, generally, Ronan has traditionally gotten a bit of a bad break when it comes to the relationship, at least from the English side of the fandom, in terms of treating him like the only one at fault for the relationship’s breakdown, which....really comes from interpreting Olympe’s relationship with the Crown as healthier than it might actually be. (Though French!Ronan threatening to put himself in danger if she won’t talk to him is....not a good look, don’t do that, kiddies. And if your SO says they’ll do it, run far, far away. Don’t walk, RUN.) 

UNFORTUNATELY, the timeline of the musical really does make it so that it’s very underdeveloped, in the sense that we really don’t get WHY they would make a good couple besides “Oh my God he’s hot.” And other musicals, such as Le Roi Soleil and La Legende du Roi Arthur, also have a similar timeframe, but the actors involved had the one thing that Ronan and Olympe lacked.....

Chemistry. 

Sadly enough, Louis Delort and Camille Lou could really never SELL Ronan/Olympe as a ship. And, unfortunately, in both of their cases, there are dynamics that I’m much more interested in working with. And the writers’ decision to force the relationship at very awkward points only makes it worse (ultimate example: THE DAUPHIN’S FUNERAL. LIKE WHAT THE FUCK? Also you’re going to tell me that a repressed noblewoman is going to bang a random peasant who probably hasn’t bathed since That One Time Soléne pushed him into a lake after TWO MEETINGS?) 

Think about your life, think about your choices. 

They TRY to show the two of them going from hatred to love, but they don’t really do their homework, and as a result, the relationship seems rushed at best and toxic at worst. Had they both survived to the end, I can really see a scenario where it would have fizzled out over time and both would have ended up resenting one another. Because remember, on Olympe’s end in particular, she would be giving up EVERYTHING to be with him. Her future, her position at court, her chance of a good match, even her noble title. Because noblewomen lost their status upon marrying below them. And if she was truly in love with Ronan, that might be compensation. But given that just about everything we see from them is fighting....................................maybe they could have resolved their issues, but I don’t see it. 

Teppei Koike and Sayaka Kanda are probably the closest I’ve seen to a Ronan/Olympe that I can actually SHIP besides that one time when I was 17 and totally shipped them and wanted them to move to the country and have babies together , mainly because they had phenomenal chemistry and Sayaka Kanda’s deadpan, fiery-yet-subdued take on Olympe matched well with Teppei Koike’s gremlin Ronan. Even though they were also both older than either Delort or Lou when they took on the roles, they also LOOKED younger, giving me more the impression of two kids in love who might have worked, might not have, but the tragedy is that they never got the chance. I really have no feeling for Kazuki Kato and Nene Yumesaki’s Ronan and Olympe, mainly because there’s very little to really give it a SPARK. I put that down to Kazuki’s general lack of life when playing Ronan, since he played the role more as a Generic Hero™ as opposed to. Ronan Mazurier, a scrappy peasant with a loud mouth. And while we’re being brutally honest I personally feel like he’s at his best in his career when he can be a secondary character to a female protagonist and then die sometime in the second act or so. (I feel like his role in Mata Hari was PERFECT for him, ditto for Lady Bess.) Because just about any time he has the full limelight, he doesn’t do AS strongly on characterization as whoever he’s been cast against. Good voice, good stage presence, but he isn’t Teppei Koike’s level of actor. 

BUT I come to bury Ronan/Olympe, not Kazuki Kato’s career, not the least because audiences do seem to love him, Toho execs seem to love him, so I’m happy with him. But it does tie into my broader lack of feeling over their version of Ronan/Olympe, because despite the spark that Nene Yumesaki gives to Olympe, really giving a balanced Olympe who’s simultaneously a mature woman and an ingenue, it still comes off as very generic. 

Ryuu Masaki and Saotome Wakaba? The most touching depiction of a gay man and a lesbian faking a relationship that I have ever seen. 

[mantra4ia]

The Rise of Skywalker: Expanded Reaction Episode I (spoilers ahead)

Approaching a Saga that I love and a film that I hate with equal parts passion and compassion.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I must preface my opinions with the one central point of view that has never wavered: You can be a Star Wars fan and a film critic simultaneously. I think the POV where the critics like a Star Wars film and the fans don’t, and people counter with “Critics, you don’t know what you’re talking about especially with Star Wars movies. You don’t know anything. Go away” is absolute garbage. I also think the opposite point of view, Diode if you will, is trash where fans like a film, critics don’t, and “fans don’t know what there talking about.” Those, I believe, are the only trash POVs as it relates to Star Wars. Everything else is fandom.

Likes (from the very big to the very detailed)

John Williams score. John Williams guided us through the film with subtly and passion. Even when things were happening on screen that I didn't like, I felt my feelings soften and shift because of the score. He composed a lot of what would have otherwise been chaos.

C-P3O: comedy comes from character, and Disney SW utilized 3PO in the best light I've ever seen him for that purpose. “Babo Frick, one of my oldest friends” was such a triumphant example. Also, in general, the humor in this film from all ensemble characters landed really well, such as “they fly now” and “what were you going to tell Rey...or is now not a good time.” I also liked the humor in The Last Jedi, but a lot of people didn't. I think that came down to TLJ execution where some of the humor felt too earthly “of the moment” and somehow the conversation turned humor into a taboo, where as RoS kept the humor classic and classy.

The banter between Rey, Poe, and Finn. Finally, I felt invested in the bond of these characters, which gave me stakes to win or lose. It took three films to set up unfortunately, but I the aforementioned Finn and Poe digging at each other and the opening between Rey and Poe – What did you do to my droid? What did you do to my ship? - really sold me on the fact that this movie might have, if not plot continuity, then emotional continuity.

Han Solo. What can I say guys, I'm a sucker for full circle, volta bracket (forgive me if my music theory analogy is wrong) story devices. It didn't necessarily make sense, but poetic beauty won and hit me in the feels. When Ben said “dad” and launched that Red Lightsaber into the stratosphere, it provided such a huge sense of catharsis I was brimming with tears.  FULL POST HERE.

The “Dyad” in the Force: Kylo and Rey’s relationship. If the Force was sentient it would have said all along: I've created my own balance in the form of two people, why are you trying to mess it up? That's as close to a direct message as I have ever gotten from the Force, expressed in themes from TFA and TLJ which culminated Luke's lightsaber blowing up in the tug of war thrown room scene. For all the people saying “another hookie, new lore, unfounded concept brought to you by Disney,” no, I feel like that's been fairly consistent. In my opinion, this is just another iteration of a recurring element in all over Star Wars: both Light and Dark side, Jedi Master/ Sith Lord and Apprentice. This is just a first time that its been a light side-dark side pair where neither are masters and all the Rise of Skywalker did was gave it a name and called it a dyad and part of what the force has needed for balance. I felt really invested in the “Reylo” dynamic. and while I was never entrenched in one specific outcome for Ben and Rey, all the possibilities were intriguing. This is perhaps the element in the sequel trilogy that was most consistently addressed in all the episodes, and it paid off for me.

The visual imagery. Say what you will about Force FedEx #that’snothowtheForceworks, but it makes for some beautiful action sequences and incredibly framed, colored, and illuminated still shots, that fired up a lot on interest in the spectacle of Star Wars even prior to IX's release. 

Kylo Ren's arc. Full appreciation post HERE. Kylo / Ben Solo is undoubtedly my favorite character of the Disney trilogy, in part due the that fact that his story has tracked the most consistently throughout three films, and also because I've always been a fan of complex antagonists. His arc's been psychologically interesting, to the point where I would have been perfectly fine with Kylo, as Supreme leader, being the main antagonist of RoS instead of Palpatine. Also, Adam Driver acts the h*** out of Ben Solo too, even though after he “turns” he has no dialogue. It's all carried on acting, and its stone cold believable.

The Leia training flashback with Luke. It added a new take on the classic trilogy that was the one big element where this movie swung for the fences on risk-taking and it paid off for me.

The *idea* of Leia being Rey’s training master. Fragmented speech aside, JJ's team did the best they could with what they had of Carrie Fisher to execute a wonderful pairing in the Force. Whether or not the best way to honor Carrie was to use the Last Jedi footage or to pass the baton in order to finish the character that she made an icon, is a healthy debate, but the best intentions were glowing.

Expanding the intricacies of Force visitation. Colloquially, the “Force Skype” from The Last Jedi, has evolved into “Force FedEx.” Even though the stage was set for this in TLJ, when Kylo touches water from the Ahch-to ocean, some people won't like this, and I totally get that. It makes many plot expediting elements easy. But admittedly, I will deal with that because it makes for some amazing iconic fight visuals. The throne room scene is still top of the trilogy, but I have to admit that when you Force FedEx a lightsaber – it makes for a fantastic mic drop.

The lightsaber fight on the Death Star wreckage. This was my favorite confrontation in RoS, ironically no Force FedEx required. The contrast of fighting style is never more apparent, Rey jumping over waves, Kylo walking through them with brute force of will. Then somewhere along the way the styles flip, Kylo's becomes more artful and Rey's more brutal (not unlike Palpatine's aggressive form) when she knows she's about to be beaten.

Kylo Ren's death blow simultaneously with Leia's death, book-ended by the fact that Leia did not become one with the Force until Ben did too. It's creative liberty to be sure, no other Force ghost transition has been like that, but it worked for me.

Best acted movie of the new trilogy overall by all the cast, parts large and small. You can tell that everyone involved made it with love.

The payoff of Finn's force-sensitivity that we got in Force Awakens mostly makes up for the pain of poor, half-retconned broom kid. We get backstory of other storm trooper deserters that we spirited from their home worlds which become broom kid substitutes. I'm also glad at the payoff of Finn joining the resistance culminated in becoming a co-leader with Poe.

Remember that one throwaway in The Last Jedi that a very vocal group (myself excluded) hated because Luke did it in exile and despair? Rise of Skywalker has an appropriate answer. When Ben throws away his cross-guard lightsaber into the waves of Death Star debris, as a mirror image to Luke but with hope, we get a very iconic moment.

Initial Reaction *** Episode II *** Episode III

[glassesandkim]

Nico did not intentionally lead Levi on, any more than Levi intentionally led Nico on. Nico was just as confused and upset by the situation in the elevator as Levi for his own reasons, and he did not owe Levi anything. He was allowed to say no. He wasn't even that much of an asshole about it. Yes, he could have done it differently but he wasn't awful. He apologized for it multiple times. You know, the people in this fandom are really transparent on who their favorite is.

Again, can’t really comment on the fandom stuff and can only speak for myself. So yeah, I have no trouble admitting that I, right now, am much more hyperfocused on Nico than on Levi and actually did not like Levi’s character at all when he was introduced. Only really started liking him after the blood bank episode. Even then, I was much more interested in the rest of the b-team than Levi (Casey and Dahlia were the two I thought would get developed more as they were far more interesting and likable than the rest of the b-team). 

But totally agree that Nico owed Levi nothing and saying no in a relationship at any time is allowed and OKAY. And yes, I’d agree too that what Nico did was not awful. I don’t actually think it was immature or unrealistic like OP pointed out in the first ask I got. I think it’s unfortunate and a dick thing to do in Levi’s perspective. And I do always think of that scene in Levi’s POV because that’s how the scene was presented.

I started writing this for the first ask so it’s a little messy but:

My initial reaction to Nico’s rejection of Levi was: wow, what a dick thing to do. But I also understand the concept of boundaries and the requirements we look for in who we want as our partners. (This might not be relative but something that made me less shocked about Nico’s reaction after the kiss was that Nico didn’t have any great or important attachments to Levi at the time). People have boundaries and rules for themselves. And possibly dating or being involved with someone who is inexperienced breaks whatever rule Nico had. Kind of like, deciding that you don’t want children and steering clear from partners that do want children. It does mean sometimes needing to tell people straight up, in the beginning, that you DO NOT want this or that. Unfortunately, life is messy and nothing goes according to plan. So people will find themselves in situations where it’s really damn shitty to tell the person you’ve been with for weeks/months/days/hours “bye” because they don’t see the benefit or possibility in trying to work things out for the sake of staying together/love/infatuation/whatever.

(Someone once said to me that who you fall in love with is sometimes really down to timing and circumstance. Y’all could be perfect for each other but if one or both of you are in conflicting positions in your lives, it’s not gonna work however hard you try. It’s like jamming a metal square into a circle. You could probably melt that metal square or polish it down to a circle. But you’ve burned it and shaved off so many parts of it. What’s left?)

Is it wrong to have rules like that? No. Was it handled well? Could’ve been better but who’s perfect???? (Personally, really didn’t like Nico mouthing wow when Levi confessed that Nico was the first man he’d ever kissed.) Like Levi said, he assumed a lot of things about Levi afterwards during the storm and was maybe a bit quick to abort the situation in the elevator. And Nico might have inserted his own assumptions, his own insecurities and his own agendas in all those situations. Again, we don’t know his backstory but even if I don’t know his backstory, I can understand why. And I’ll give Nico this: he was clear about what he wasn’t looking for and what he didn’t want to do and apologized many times. And I think Levi reacted like he would given that he was rejected after being pursued while simultaneously confessing something that was probably hard to confess. Was it appropriate for him to bust Nico’s nuts (lol pun not intended) during the storm? Probably not. (And it’s the “thing” his character does: He confronted Jo when she stole his patient and got yelled at by Alex.).

I’d be butthurt too if I were Levi but I am also someone who feels like I’ll give people my time and energy if I am willing to. And I think Nico did that well and I would probably commend him for laying down the law before things got any further. 

But It’s hard for me to 100% like what Nico did because, as a viewer, I was already biased and liked Levi Schmitt more than Nico (at that time. Right now, I’d say I have a softer spot for Nico for reasons sometimes unrelated to the ship but that’s another topic). Plus Grey’s didn’t frame that scene for us to empathize with Nico. 

Anyway, that was very long and convoluted and I’m sure it contradicted a lot of things I talked about before lol but those are my opinions and I am presenting them as is. There’s really no right or wrong person in that scene. Just all unfortunate parts depending on which perspective you look through. 

[baddieromanova]

Why do you attack and hate people just because they don’t like Falice?

This is my first ever anon message? Okay, I normally dismiss questions like these but since it’s my first I’ll oblige:

Anon, I don’t hate and attack people for disliking Falice. I mean, if my rants and posts on social media come off that way then all I can do is apologise I guess because that’s not my intention at all but honestly I don’t give a fuck if people don’t like Falice or don’t ship them, I follow plenty of people in the fandom who don’t, we all have our likes and dislikes and ship preferences and that’s fine, what matter’s is that we’re all part of this wacky fandom together for a show we watch and simultaneously wish to get cancelled. 

Now onto my actual issues; I have an issue with Falice anti’s who’s reasons for hating Falice are beyond transparent, problematic or utter bullshit, because one thing in fandoms I absolutely hate is people going out of their way to sound deep and intellectual and listing off reasons (Which isn’t a problem, we all do it) to explain why they hate a ship when in actuality, it’s really a vague, shallow or simple reason behind their disdain and if it’s not that, they’re bordering into blatant hypocrisy or just being all around fake. Allow me to explain some examples of this I’ve seen in the fandom;

1) Suddenly Gladys, a character we knew very little about for 2 whole seasons, other than the fact that she was Jughead’s mother and left her alcoholic husband because he wouldn’t get his shit together, all of a sudden has tonnes of stans and she hasn’t even appeared on screen yet. She had stans before we even knew who was playing her, and who are the very people stanning her? Take a wild guess. Only the very sub section of the fandom who spent the whole of last season bashing her for neglecting Jughead. But of course, now that Falice is happening they’ve jumped aboard the team Gladys train, not because they genuinely like her, but in the hopes that she’ll get in between Alice and FP. I mean, if they wanna stan her then great but I don’t wanna see complaints when she’s written out or killed off, seeing as she’s only being introduced to start up some Falice angst, just saying. These same people have also started a campaign against FP and Alice calling them out as bad parents. This makes me laugh because where was this energy back in early season one when FP and Alice’s parenting skills should have been questioned? That season was definitely not their peak but I think we can all agree they’ve improved vastly in the parenting department since then but back to my point. It’s almost like the lack of Falice back then had something to do with their silence on parenting skills, but maybe that’s just a coincidence 

2) A lot of Falice anti’s genuinely see Hal/ Halice as a better alternative, which it isn’t. Falice has it’s problems, with FP’s alcoholism and both of their marriages still being legal and all, but honestly what fictional ship doesn’t? And fandoms are always gonna find something problematic in a ship they don’t like, but Falice are by far miles better than H/lice, this isn’t even an opinion it’s a fact. First there’s the obvious, Hal is a serial killer who tried to kill Alice and their daughter which kind of trumps every problem with Falice, but even if you take the ridiculous Black Hood scenario out of the equation and pretend that plot never happened, Hal and his marriage to Alice was/is still very problematic. There was never any chemistry between them, not much love either, they always just stuck out to me as that one lame middle aged white couple in TV dramas who seem “perfect” to everybody in town but behind closed doors it’s a different story and have spent so much time being more concerned with keeping up their white picket fence facade that they have yet to realise they don’t actually love each other, mainly because the woman knows she should have married somebody else and is still in love with somebody else, which is exactly the case for H/lice and Falice

On top of that, Hal is kind of a scumbag, even before the Black Hood plot he was a dick and radiated small dick energy 24/7. I’m not going to list all the reasons here, this post is already much longer than I intended so I’m just going to add a link to one of my anti Hal posts (X). Do I think Hal and Alice cared for each other at one point? Of course but do I ever think they were in love? Hell no. Alice saw him as a ticket out of the Southside to a better life for herself and Hal saw her as a bad girl he had a hard on for, that he could tame. If people see that as love, then I don’t know what to tell them. I mean if you hate Falice then whatever but to continue to ship Alice with Hal? Come on, at least ship her with Fred or Hermione before jumping aboard the H/lice ship

3) I’ve actually seen people who spent the whole of season two wishing for Josie and Sierra to be killed off or written out and have attacked them for breathing, conveniently stan Josie this season and demand for Josie/Ashleigh to get more screen time “because she deserves it more than Falice” (She does deserve more screen time and better treatment in general but that’s another argument for another day) and make stupid Falice and Tierra comparisons as if only one Parentdale couple can exist. And they’ve done this all just to have a dig at Falice not because they care about the Tierra ship or are tired of the only dark skin black girl being used as a prop for a bunch of white character’s storylines, never having any storylines of her own and being relegated to a human radio almost every episode. How pathetic can you get? Like, don’t piss in my ear and tell me it’s rain. Fuck outta here with your faux concern

4) I’ve seen multiple lengthy posts highlighting how “damaging” the Falice coupling is FP and Alice’s characterisation and development in general which is bullshit. The minute Alice removed Hal out of her life she became a better mother and a decent person, she was more caring and began putting her daughter’s first, over keeping up a facade for the town, she was no longer the cold heartless cow she was in earlier episodes who was putting on the perfect Stepford wife with the perfect suburban family performance and prioritising how the town saw her and her family over her daughter’s needs. As for FP’s character development and characterisation, he changed his life around for the better for his son because he wanted to do right by him. He quit drinking, got a job, attended AA, quit the Serpents and sternly said he was done with gang life (Yes we all know how that actually turned out but it’s the attempt that matters here and take the circumstances into consideration) and actually began to parent Jughead. It was a far cry from what we were introduced to in season one where we he was drinking his breakfast, lunch and dinner, deep into gang life and appeared to not give a rat’s ass that his son was sleeping on the streets. 

There’s nothing wrong with having a simple or vague reason for not liking a ship, absolutely nothing at all, there’s no need to type out utter bullshit to defend your hatred for a couple. For instance, I don’t like B/ghead because they’re overrated and Roberto’s obsession with them is slowly but surely damaging the show. That’s it! You won’t see me writing lengthy think piece’s on why I hate that ship despite all the problematic aspects within the couple that I do see because I could honestly forgive and dismiss all of it if B/ghead was not constantly shoved down our throats. They would just be a ship I didn’t care about. FP and Alice’s relationship had nothing to do with their development as people/parents or their characterisation, it hasn’t regressed them in any way, shape or form seeing as they changed for the better and became much better characters before their relationship began to blossom. So all of this talk of how their relationship has ruined them as people makes me laugh. Unless I’m mistaken, FP is still showing clear character progression. Alice was also showing clear character progression towards the end of season two, we’re going to exclude the cult story line from this discussion because while it has changed Alice’s character, the Alice we know and love will return to us soon and the Falice relationship still had nothing to do with that, but if these same individuals want someone or some ship to blame for Alice’s involvement with this cult, they should actually look closer to home.

5) Linked to #2 and #4. They also claim to dislike Falice for a myriad of reasons they think are deep when in reality they just hate Falice because it interrupted their already on the verge of dying ship or crackships that involve Alice and FP and won’t (and never will) happen. I don’t like to shit on people’s shipping preferences, I’ve been on the receiving end of that shitty behaviour in fandoms and even the people working on the show before and you really can’t help who you ship at the end of the day but one thing I’ve learnt from that experience is when to give up, admit defeat and accept that your favoured ship isn’t, never will be and never was a priority to the writing crew and show runner and move the hell on. Granted I moved on from that show a little too late but what matters is I did it. I abandoned the show, fandom, cast and never looked back and felt better already because trust me, that shit takes a toll on your mental and emotional state and I was going off the deep end so it’s a good thing I left that show and fandom for good. This would’ve been the case if I shipped H/lice, the minute I fell for them would’ve been the minute I told myself not to get too invested and prepare for heartbreak because it was clear from the get go that H/lice was not a couple the writers had interest in developing or writing well. Like I said prior, they were another typical suburban couple keeping up a facade for their neighbours but deep down didn’t actually love each other and they would’ve divorced eventually and had Lochlyn written out of the show, not only because Hal and Alice didn’t love each other but also because it’s clear that for each of the teens, the writers for some reason only want one parent around for each of them, for the boys it’s their father’s and for the girls it’s their mothers (Hiram’s a different case because he’s a villain but he’ll be killed off eventually). People say the Black Hood story line was only introduced to get Hal out of the way to make room for Falice but I guarantee you, if he wasn’t the Black Hood he would’ve definitely been one of his victims. The Riverdale writers would have gone down the route of having Hal killed off because it would’ve allowed them to put Betty at the centre of the story line, something they like to do constantly but that’s also another argument for another day. If H/lice shippers had realised that and accepted it, they wouldn’t be in the predicament they’re in right now

6) People re write canon and the established history on the show and between the parents to fit their delusions and beliefs and it’s just creepy. I get coming up with theories and trying to make sense of something but there’s a fine line between theories, head-canons and refusing to accept the truth or facts. Take Charles’ paternity for instance, that’s caused up quite a stir within the fandom in general. For some reason, for the longest time people struggled with the fact that FP was the father of the baby Alice had in high school, some people still struggle with this unfortunately. 

Now, I’d understand refusal to accept FP as the father or seeing this plot being a retcon or rushed or even being a little thrown off by it, IF IT WASN’T FUCKING ESTABLISHED IN SEASON ONE, WHICH IT WAS. This is why don’t understand all the debates on Charles’ paternity. The very first Falice interaction had clear implications that the two had a sexual/romantic history and we found out two episodes prior that Alice fell pregnant as a teenager, yet people can’t do the math.