#and if you're directly contradicting the text

[honestlyvan]

Y'know, I don't think it's accurate to say that you can do fandom "wrong", but I do definitely think that there are people out there doing fandom things that are totally cromulent, except they're based on a blatant misreading or at least directly contradict aspects of the texts, and unless they're explicitly labeling their doing of fandom as "adversarial" or otherwise, I would feel comfortable saying they're doing fandom "incorrectly".

[panharmonium]

Hi! I love your Naruto thoughts and meta posts with all my heart and I want to ask your thoughts on something that has been on my mind literally since I was 13: what do you think about the relationship between Sasuke and Sakura? I went from being a hardcore shipper when I was a teenager, to being against any romantic relationship in Naruto after finishing the anime when I was in my early twenties. Nowadays I'm very into platonic love and depictions of friendship and I think the anime's obsession with forcing the "romantic interest" curse upon the main female character robbed us of... so much. There are a few wonderful moments in the anime where Sasuke and Sakura acknowledge each other, but because she's always "the girl with the crush", her actions are so often interpret as irrational or selfish by the fandom.

Hi @riemmetric!  It's great to talk to you again! Sorry it's taken me so long to answer this; RL has been making demands of me lately and it took me way longer to finish writing this up than I wanted it to (then again, I knew from the minute I read your original ask that my reply was going to get long, so I suppose I should have predicted a delay XD)

It's funny, my sister once asked me to choose between Sasuke or Sakura for an “unpopular opinion” meme, and I ended up doing Sasuke solely because I think the negative fandom opinions about Sakura are so unhinged and divorced from the actual text that I wouldn’t even know where to start.  People are entitled to dislike whatever characters they want, obviously, but there are some fandom takes that are, for me, so obviously rooted in bad faith viewings/readings that there’s no urge in me to discuss them.  That said, since you asked, I’m happy to go into my own thoughts on this a bit, with the disclaimer for other potential readers that I only write about fandom things for my own personal enjoyment, not as a contribution to The Discourse. If you don’t like Sakura, great!  I have no interest in changing your mind. Please consider this a sincere invitation to scroll on by and go enjoy whatever parts of the fandom appeal to you.

In general terms: I love Sasuke and Sakura’s relationship as much as I love all of the relationships in Team 7.  If we’re talking about them specifically as a romantic couple, then I probably fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, because I do like them together in a post-canon (to be clear: non-Boruto) setting, after time has passed and they’ve continued to develop individually and reconnect with each other, but I also wouldn’t exactly call myself an intense “shipper,” in the sense that I have no interest in pulling things out from the text and incorrectly citing them as evidence that Sasuke has hidden romantic feelings for her during the canon period. He cares about her in the canon period, just like he cares about Naruto and Kakashi.  That’s not up for interpretation; it’s the text.  But Sasuke during the canon time period does not demonstrate specifically romantic interest in anyone.  

[A note before people who might ship Sasuke with Someone Else emerge to rail against this statement - please just scroll past and continue enjoying fandom in whatever way is most fun for you. It is cool to ship whatever fanon thing you want; I think that’s great!  But earnestly citing any loving or emotional thing Sasuke does re: various characters in this story (yes, Sakura included) as indicative of specifically romantic love isn’t supported by the text. I know there are always going to be enormous subsets of any fandom who insist that it is, and I'm certainly not going to barge into anyone else's space to complain about that (because other people having fun together is harmless and none of my business), but I'm not obligated to indulge it on my own blog, either.]

Anyway, that said - the reason why I love Sakura and Sasuke’s relationship (from here on out I’ll use “relationship” in a general, non-romantic sense) is precisely because Sakura isn’t just “the girl with the crush.” Sakura has an arc when it comes to Sasuke, and its trajectory moves in the exact opposite direction of “irrational” or “selfish.”  She specifically goes from “the girl with the crush” to “the girl who steels herself and tries to put her personal feelings for Sasuke aside for the greater good” to “the girl who knows she can’t put her feelings aside, but who also knows full well that Sasuke doesn’t reciprocate them, and who still wants to save him regardless, because he matters to her as a person and a friend.”

[I'm putting the rest of this under a cut to save everyone's dash, and also to emphasize once again that this is a personal post on my personal blog which I wrote in response to a question from a personal acquaintance, the full content of which no one is obligated to read. I am not sending this post to random strangers and forcing them to look at it. I'm not even putting it in the character tags. I'm typing it up on my own blog and putting it under a cut. If you already know that you don't like Sakura, but you still click the link/read the post and then feel an urge to comment and complain, I am going to copy-paste this disclaimer and remind you that I specifically recommended that you scroll past and go have fun with fandom in your own way. Thanks in advance for responsibly curating your own fandom experience!]

So, from the top:

1. the girl with the crush

Sakura is, obviously, completely obsessed with Sasuke at the beginning of Part 1.  She’s also deeply clueless about him and his history (bizarre though it is, the story seems to indicate that she initially doesn’t know what happened with his family, the same way young!Obito is initially clueless about Kakashi’s father).  But what I like about Sakura and Sasuke’s Part 1 relationship is how this changes over time.

The critical scene that kicks this off happens right at the beginning of the manga, when she and Sasuke are talking by that bench - she complains about Naruto and blames his behavior on him being all alone/having no family to scold him; and even says she’s jealous that he doesn’t have parents to nag him all the time.  This obviously triggers an outburst from Sasuke, who tells her she has no idea what loneliness means and that she “makes him sick”/she’s “annoying” (importantly, the exact same thing Sakura said to Naruto in anger earlier that day), which in turn prompts Sakura to reassess herself and wonder whether she’s been making Naruto feel this terrible all the time, too:

From that point on, it’s a process of her putting little pieces together.  She still has a MAJOR crush, and she still acts like a twelve year-old, but as we approach the end of Part I, Sakura actually has a more accurate grasp on Sasuke’s current state of mind than Naruto does.  Naruto is initially excited to fight Sasuke on top of the hospital, because he feels like Sasuke’s finally acknowledging him, whereas Sakura is the one who immediately recognizes that something is wrong about this situation.  She is also the one who, after this fight, is concerned that Sasuke is really unwell and might do something drastic like run off in pursuit of the power Orochimaru promised him, but when she communicates this to Naruto, he assures her that this would NEVER happen:

(Sakura isn't convinced, though, because she goes to monitor the exit out of the village anyway.)

I’m not criticizing Naruto for his response here.  I ADORE hearing him say that Sasuke is too strong to need Orochimaru, with such perfect confidence - I love seeing how much respect and admiration he has for Sasuke underneath all their fighting, because that’s the whole reason he’s always baiting Sasuke and yelling at him and claiming “you're not so great!” He looks up to Sasuke; he wants to be like Sasuke; he thinks Sasuke is awesome! (It’s that Obito @ Kakashi behavior, you know?) But the fact remains that he is clueless about what’s actually going on with Sasuke in Part 1, and he remains clueless(ly optimistic) for a long time.  

(Eg, when he catches up to Sasuke during the retrieval arc and Sasuke climbs out of that cursed seal coffin, Naruto waves at him and calls "Come on, let's go!" as if Sasuke has been successfully rescued and is now going to come running home.  Even in Part II, when Naruto hears that Sasuke killed Orochimaru, he beams and immediately says, “So he must be on his way back to the Leaf Village!”  And everyone else in the room is like, “....,” because they know better.  Naruto doesn’t yet fully understand [or doesn't want to accept] the extent to which Sasuke has willingly chosen this path, and it’s not until after Jiraiya’s death/the Pain attack/the Five Kage Summit that Naruto really starts to understand Sasuke more clearly, which is something he himself admits.)

Sakura, in Part 1, has access to more information about Sasuke - she’s there for his first dissociative monologue during the bells test, she’s there for the curse mark’s placement, she’s there for his first violent transformation in the Forest of Death - she is, in fact, the unwitting catalyst for it (“Sakura…who did this to you?”), and her compassion is the reason Sasuke is later able to overcome the curse mark’s influence - so she has a more accurate/complete picture of “how he’s doing,” for lack of a better phrase, whereas Naruto, who doesn’t know about the curse mark in the first place, is still in the dark.  This means that Sakura is able to accurately discern that Sasuke is struggling more than Naruto realizes, and specifically to predict that he’s going to run away.  

(This dynamic is then interestingly flipped in the back half of Part II, since at any point after the Five Kage Summit, Sakura doesn’t have access to extremely relevant [if currently questionable and unproven] details that would in any other circumstance inform her behavior).

Of course, just because she has more info in Part 1 doesn’t mean she has some kind of miraculous insight into Sasuke’s every thought and feeling.  There are parts of her attempt to convince Sasuke to stay in the village that are as clueless as any of Naruto’s assumptions, and they showcase the kind of magical thinking common to childhood - like when she says that if he stayed with her, she could give him happiness, she’d do anything for him, even help him get his revenge - this idea that she herself can do something to make him feel better, that she can love him powerfully enough to defeat his pain - obviously none of that is rooted in realism.

Is this part of her approach irrational and immature and inadvertently self-centered?  Of course it is!  But it’s no more irrational and immature and inadvertently self-centered than Naruto’s stated plan to drag Sasuke back to the village even if he has to “break every bone in [his] body!” 

Hating on Sakura for her Part 1 attempt to convince Sasuke to stay in the village while simultaneously lauding Naruto for his feels like a bad faith misread of what is, to me, pretty clear narrative intention.  The story doesn’t at any point intend for us to see her begging him to stay as a selfish or conniving attempt to get something she wants.  She’s begging him to stay for the same underlying reason that Naruto is: she cares about him.  She thinks he’s making a mistake that will only cause him more pain in the end (she’s right) and she wants to make it so he feels less pain right now (she can’t.  But she doesn’t understand that/isn’t able to admit that, and she’s willing to try ANYTHING that might help).  

It’s critical that this farewell scene is set in front of that same bench from their first important confrontation - she references that day and how angry he got at her, and this time she tells him that she understands his reaction.  She’s learned things and she recognizes how insensitive she was being back then (“I know what happened to your clan, Sasuke”), even though she still can’t fully grasp all the complexities of the situation. She tells him that him blowing up at her back then helped her understand what loneliness actually meant (as opposed to her previous shallow understanding of it), and she challenges him about his choice right now: "So that's it, you're choosing the lonely path?" And when she tells him that she'll be very lonely if he leaves, we're immediately shown a panel of Sasuke thinking of both his friends, with the very clear implication that if he goes through with this, he will be lonely without them, too - that he's still struggling with the idea of leaving them, no matter how hard he tries to pretend:

Sakura at this point knows that Sasuke isn’t interested in her the way she is in him, but she still wants to give him happiness, however fantastical and immature her ideas sound to us (and, I’m sure, to him).  “I’ll do anything, even help you get your revenge/we'll have fun every day, and...and you'll be happy! I'll make sure of it!” - of course, it’s completely childish.  It’s irrational.  It’s ridiculous to think that any of this would ever be effective, but no more ridiculous than Naruto’s belief that he can simply break every bone in Sasuke’s body and keep him in the Leaf by force.

Both Naruto and Sakura are children who have a deeply oversimplified understanding of Sasuke’s situation.  They both still think they can fix him themselves.  They both think they can save him themselves.  They both think they can convince (or force) him to do what they want, what they think is in his best interests.  Both of them don’t yet understand that he has to want to come back, if it’s ever going to mean anything.  Their attempts to keep him in the village are immature and unrealistic, yes.  What they aren’t, however, is selfish, because neither Sakura nor Naruto are doing any of this with the intention of advancing their own interests.  They’re only thinking about Sasuke - how to keep Sasuke safe, how to make Sasuke happy - even when neither of them are taking an approach that will actually work.

Naruto and Sakura are children.  They’re afraid of losing somebody they care about.  Their attempts to prevent that from happening are desperate and messy and ultimately ineffective, but they are also genuinely felt and rooted in a true desire to rescue Sasuke from his pain, which - and this is the single most important thing that should impact our viewing of Part 1 - is something that Sasuke RECOGNIZES.  He doesn’t spend that agonizingly long moment bowed over Naruto’s defeated body so we can pretend he doesn’t understand that Naruto was just trying to help him.  He doesn’t take the time to murmur, “Sakura…thank you,” before laying her out carefully on a bench, just so we can discount it and pretend that he doesn’t recognize and appreciate her genuine intention to make things better for him, however clumsy that attempt might have been.

2. the greater good

If Stage 1 Sakura is "the girl with the crush," then Stage 2 Sakura is a progression to “the girl who decides to put her feelings for Sasuke aside in order to protect innocent people, including (but certainly not limited to) Naruto.”  She’s driven to this decision by interactions with Shikamaru, who all too recently had to grow up fast himself (“We're not kids anymore...we can't allow a war to break out between the Hidden Leaf and the Hidden Cloud because of Sasuke") and Sai, who risks his new friendship with Sakura and Team 7 in order to speak some hard truths and deliver one of my favorite lines in the whole story: “I don’t know what promise Naruto made to you, but it’s really no different than what was done to me.  It’s like a curse mark.”

(INCREDIBLE.  How can anybody be complaining about a season where Sai gets to say something that goes THIS HARD and Sakura LISTENS and takes DRAMATIC ACTION that actually propels the story forward in a meaningful way - )

[Okay, yeah, brief personal opinion interlude - it is just bonkers wild to me that there are people who complain about Sakura in the Five Kage Summit arc. That entire season is the greatest character arc she ever has.  Literally she has never been more interesting and dynamic than in Season 10; it’s the first time she ever gets to be as deep and fascinating as the boys; what is everybody so worked up about?  Oh, “she lied to Naruto that one time” - Sasuke joined infant-kidnapping baby-murdering human experimentation machine Orochimaru when he was twelve years old in order to (dare I say it????) selfishly pursue his personal goals and yet, somehow, we are still able to root for him.  He abandoned his friends/allies to imprisonment and death (Suigetsu and Jūgo) or outright stabbed them in the chest himself (Karin) in order to (SELFISHLY) get what he wanted, and yet, somehow, we are still able to love him, understand him, and be on his side.  Naruto is canonically not upset with Sakura about her lie after receiving context for the situation and I think we can probably take our cues from him without feeling the need to bring her up on war crimes; please calm down]

[Sorry, I just really love most of Season 10 and think it’s one of the best examples of how good this story can be when every single character gets to do something that matters (as opposed to things being all Naruto, all the time) so I get a little bit worked up over people complaining about some of the best writing Sakura ever gets.  I don’t understand what certain elements of fandom want from her. People complain about her being “useless” and not doing anything that contributes to the story, but then they complain just as much when she does finally get to act decisively and have just as complex/dynamic an inner world as the boys.  She’s “weak” for being unreasonably in love with Sasuke, but when she tries to be “strong” and put her love for him aside and eliminate him in order to protect Naruto and the rest of the world, she’s evil, because she should have been more understanding of his situation (despite the fact that she doesn’t KNOW anything about his situation).  But then when she can’t go through with killing him after all because she cares about him too much despite the things he’s done, she’s not "compassionate" or "kind" or "a good friend," she’s “weak” again. Nothing Sakura does in S10 is more wrongheaded or rash than any of the batshit, buckwild things Naruto and Sasuke have done in the past (and will continue to do in the future), but when Naruto and Sasuke have big feelings or take bold action, it makes them interesting characters, whereas Sakura can’t breathe in anyone’s direction without being minutely scrutinized for moral impurities.]  

Anyway. Back to a more measured response.  

Every single piece of development Sakura has with regard to Sasuke in this season satisfies me so much.  Her initial shock and disbelief at hearing that Sasuke had joined the Akatsuki?  Good, appropriate.  The fact that she starts to acknowledge the reality of what Sasuke’s done sooner than Naruto does?  Also extremely appropriate, very in-character for both of them.  Her taking Sai’s words to heart and deciding that the promise she asked Naruto to make when they were children is causing him to suffer and she has to relieve him of that burden?  Juicy!  AND thematically significant (promises!!!!  the burden that a promise places on a person, especially when it can't be kept - we've seen that before in this story and we'll see it again).  Her anguished pivot from wanting to protect Sasuke to realizing that she has a responsibility to protect the countless innocents who will die because of the war he’s trying to start?  HELLO THIS IS INCREDIBLE CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT.  Her knocking out the classmates who agreed to help her so they don’t have to share in her burden (and so the only person Naruto will hate when it’s over is her)?  BRUH.  Her being so committed and focused on her goal of saving innocents and protecting Naruto (not just from being harmed by Sasuke/the Akatsuki, but by the possibility that Naruto will someday have to hurt Sasuke himself) that she tries to take everything on by herself and walks into a confrontation that she absolutely cannot win??  INCREDIBLE.  (Literally the first time I watched this, I said, “Finally!!!  It’s Sakura’s turn to go off the rails!”  I laughed with my sister about how Kakashi isn’t even mad, because Naruto and Sasuke have been pulling stunts like this for years and Sakura was way overdue for her own meltdown.)  And then, after Kakashi intervenes in the fight - Sakura barreling back into the battle when she realizes he’s going to take on the burden of killing Sasuke himself in order to spare her and Naruto the horror - “I can’t let Kakashi-sensei bear this burden!”  I love her for that.  

And then, of course, in the end - her not being able to do hurt Sasuke after all.  Despite committing herself to the act, despite forcing herself to put her feelings for him aside, despite resolving to stop him from starting a war and killing innocent people, she can’t harm him.  She cares about him too much.  This, too, is thematically significant - think about Itachi’s “you don’t have enough hatred” - she doesn’t have enough hatred to kill someone she cares about, even if it seems like he deserves it, even if would be the right thing to do to protect others.  She can’t do it, and Sasuke almost kills her for her compassion.  

I love the dynamic this sets up between her and Sasuke, for a few reasons:

1) Personally, I think Sasuke respects Sakura much more for trying to kill him than he would have if she’d just tried to talk him out of his behavior or beg him to come home (a la their original confrontation in Part 1).  This is the first significant interaction he’s had with Sakura in years, and the fact that she does something SO contrary to his memory of her is an important demonstration of the fact that she’s not the same girl she used to be.  Sasuke spends a lot of time after his defection declaring to his old team “I’ve changed; I’m not that person anymore,” but this is one of the moments where he’s forced to acknowledge that his teammates have changed, too.  Time didn’t just stop for them when he left.  While he was turning into someone new, so were they.  They grew up without him, and his old memories of them can’t encompass the whole picture of who they are now.  

(This is a little tangential, but in general, I love the spectrum of reactions that Naruto, Sakura, and Kakashi have in this sequence, and the way that all of them are ultimately messages Sasuke needs to hear.  Sasuke - who we know textually regrets what he did here, who apologizes to Sakura for it later - for “everything,” in fact - needs Naruto’s aggressively optimistic open-arms policy, yes, needs that potential, that unconditional possibility of return.  He also needs Sakura’s refusal to let him hurt her friends and start a war that will kill thousands of people, needs her surprisingly ruthless attempt to take him down; needs just as much her failure to do so, because it shows him that she still loves him too much to kill him even as she condemns him.  And he needs Kakashi’s grim line in the sand, needs someone who very possibly won't hesitate like Sakura (despite the horrifying personal cost), someone who will try to reach him but also won't let him escape and become the next generation’s Orochimaru, who won't let him cause untold suffering to untold numbers of people just because a teacher loved him too much to stop him when he had the chance. 

(And then even Kakashi chooses not to deliver a killing blow when he has the opportunity -)

(I know that in fandom people are more likely to be all, “oh, Naruto Good, everybody else Bad,” but I don’t think the narrative frames Sakura or Kakashi as “worse” than Naruto in any way.  The story goes out of its way to make it clear how desperately they don’t want to hurt Sasuke and how much they care about him.  And [this is just my interpretation, so obviously I won’t claim it as fact], I personally think that Sasuke - Sasuke, who, looking back, can see how lost he was then and how tortured he would have been if he’d gone through with many of his plans - would be grateful to Sakura and Kakashi for making an attempt to stop him when he couldn’t stop himself.)

2) On the other side of this, the fact that Sakura wasn’t able to deliver the killing blow means a lot. Sasuke was incapacitated under that bridge; he was completely at her mercy - but she stopped with the kunai an inch from his back.  She couldn’t kill him, even though she knew that he was completely willing to kill her (because he'd attempted to Chidori-assassinate her from behind just a few minutes ago).  That’s huge!  Sasuke is too out of his head right now to process this or understand it, but later, it's going to matter.  She stayed her hand.  She spared his life.  She loved him too much to hurt him, even when he’d given her every reason to take him down.  She hesitated, and he almost killed her for it, but her inability to strike him ultimately gave him yet another chance to come home, another chance to get better, another chance to have a life outside of his pain.  Despite everything, some part of her still hadn’t really given up on him, and that knowledge will matter later, when he’s finally able to acknowledge it.  

The point of all this is to say that I really have no complaints about Sakura and Sasuke’s dynamic in their S10 confrontation.  This season is the point where Sakura fully grows past her “girl with a crush” stage and into her “shinobi must make very harsh decisions” adulthood, but it never means that she doesn’t care about the person she’s trying to take down.  Her ultimate inability to deliver the killing blow remains a dangling lifeline for her relationship with Sasuke, an open door that Sasuke is able to walk through at the end of the story (literally, in fact, when Sakura opens that portal for him and saves him from Kaguya’s desert prison, and figuratively, too, when Sasuke apologizes to her).

3. she only wants to save you

The last stage in their relationship is what Sakura settles into during the war arc.  She started off Part 1 being just a girl with a crush, then tried to harden her heart and put her feelings for Sasuke aside in service of the greater good, but she was unable to actually follow through and kill him, and because of that, what she’s come to accept by the war arc is actually two things: that 1) Sasuke truly is willing to let her die if it furthers his goals, and 2) she wants to save him anyway.  

She has no intention of pursuing Sasuke romantically.  She knows full well that Sasuke isn’t interested in her.  She even knows that Sasuke isn’t really on their side (there’s a great scene where Sai questions Sakura about Sasuke’s return, and she reassures him that everything is fine, and Sai sadly thinks to himself “even I can tell your smile is fake”).  She’s well-aware that Sasuke didn’t try to help her when Madara stabbed her.  She’s well-aware that he left her to die in the lava pit.  She’s also well-aware that none of this is enough to make her stop loving him.  He doesn’t have to care about her - she still cares about him.  She still wants to help him.  She still wants to save him.

This is not hidden, hard-to-parse character development.  It’s explicitly articulated on the page:

Sakura’s not trying or wanting to make you hers!  She only wants to save you.

I’m not sure if people look at this last confrontation and unquestioningly take Sasuke at his word (as if we haven’t just read 71 volumes/watched 700 episodes showing us how how painfully distorted his thinking is), or if they stop reading/watching before the end of the scene, or if they don’t understand that Sasuke saying something doesn’t make that statement an accurate representation of reality.  The entire point of this scene is to show us how deeply mistaken Sasuke is about Sakura (and, by extension, the rest of Team 7).  He’s locked into a false pattern of thinking.  His single-minded focus on revenge and destruction has blinded him to the unconditional love his friends feel for him; he’s become so accustomed to using others and being used that he can’t understand or accept that someone would care about him without needing a reason, without needing him to love them back, without needing to receive something from him in exchange.

Sakura’s not trying or wanting to make you hers!  She only wants to save you.

Sasuke matters to Sakura as more than a love interest.  He always has.  She does love him romantically, yes, but she doesn’t only love him romantically, and her desire to help him is not and has never been contingent on him returning her feelings, romantically or otherwise.  Sasuke isn’t able to acknowledge that in this scene, but that doesn’t mean we’re supposed to just sit back and agree with his warped perspective.  Kakashi is the one who’s explicitly positioned as the voice of the narrative here.  We, as the audience, are supposed to recognize that Kakashi is the one telling us the truth.

[tangential thing 1: You don’t have to love Sakura's last plea to Sasuke here. It’s not my favorite, either - the best part, other than Kakashi’s speech at the end, is the moment after Kakashi collapses when Sakura’s expression changes from pained uncertainty to pure rage, when she grits her teeth together - when I first saw that, I almost leapt out of my seat like “Oh my god.  She’s finally going to let him have it.  It’s finally happening - ”  I wanted that so badly, and I still think it would have been a more effective writing choice for Sakura’s last words to lean more into her anger at the suffering Sasuke is causing all of them (himself included!) and less into yet another of Kishimoto’s “let me have Sakura articulate what a shame it is that she can’t do as much as Naruto despite the fact that I literally just went through a major reveal sequence in the war to show that she’s caught up to the boys; I can’t make up my mind about whether I want her to progress or not” - it’s extremely frustrating (and it's something he does at the very end of the S10 Team 7 reunion, too, which is the ONLY moment of S10 that falls flat for me).  But at the same time, even if there are ways this sequence could be more satisfying, it doesn’t change the fact that her plea to him is not remotely motivated by a desire to be with him romantically and not anything to condemn her for.]

[tangential thing 2: I do like how she remembers that moment when Sasuke says “Thank you.”  That panel precedes her saying “If there’s even a tiny corner of your heart that thinks about me…” (which I’m sure is one of the things that people like to criticize about this scene, aka “oh she’s sooooo self-centered” etc), but that particular line of dialogue is preceded by that particular flashback panel for a reason: Sakura knows that Sasuke DOES think about her.  He thinks about all of them.  Sakura remembers that “thank you,” and it reminds her that despite everything Sasuke has done and said since, despite all evidence to the contrary, she knows in her bones that his expression of gratitude back then was genuine.  He cared about her once.  He cared about all of them.  She’s trying to reach the part of him that still does, if it exists.]

[tangential thing 3: The fact that Kakashi says “she suffers from loving you,” and it triggers Sasuke to remember his own family - thinking about how much he suffered (and still suffers) from loving them - “Perhaps…those are the ties to a failed past” - the idea that it’s not worth it to have bonds if it means you suffer this much…that it’s too difficult, it’s too painful, and if Sakura and the rest of Team 7 were smarter they would just give it up (all Sasuke knows how to do now is sever potential bonds before they can hurt him; so why aren’t Sakura and the rest of his teammates doing that, why can’t they let it go, why are they making this so hard - ) << yeah, he clearly doesn't care about her/them at all.]

4. the shadow of my family

This has all been a really long way to answer the original question, but the short response to “What do you think about the relationship between Sasuke and Sakura?” is “I really care about it,” just like I really care about the relationship between Sasuke and Naruto, just like I really care about the relationship between Sasuke and Kakashi. And I don’t think the story ever asks me to choose between them.

I’m not sure whether it’s the impact of Boruto-era “canon” that gets in the way of other people approaching things this way (I don’t consider sequel material when I evaluate the original story), or if it’s Kishimoto’s frequent disinterest in/disrespect towards female characters, which yes, does sometimes make it harder, or if it's a shipping thing (bane of my existence), or some combination of factors, but for me, taking one member of Team 7 out of the equation hobbles the rest of the story.  I can’t read/watch Naruto while hating one of the protagonists and loving the other three.  It doesn’t work like that for me.  The story wasn’t written that way, and there’s nothing in the text that would cause me to receive it that way.

That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with disliking one of the main foursome (or any character, for that matter) - obviously we're all going to have different preferences, and everyone is free to enjoy or reject whatever parts of a story they want, or to like or dislike whatever characters they want. I know that some people have more fun disregarding canon and doing their own thing, which is fine.  My own personal zone of enjoyment comes from receiving the story as closely to how I think it was intended to be read as I can, and personally, when I look at this particular story, what I see is that all the members of Team 7 clearly demonstrate their love for Sasuke in ways that he himself later recognizes and acknowledges. All of them are driven by their desire to save him and their unwillingness to hurt him. All of them make repeated choices to chase after him when he runs away, to trust him when he hasn't exactly earned it, to give him another chance when he doesn't appear to deserve it. ALL of them, not just Naruto, do these things multiple times throughout the story, and Sasuke owes his life (and thus his eventual recovery) to ALL of them, many times over. Kakashi disobeys Hokage-elect Danzō and breaks the law to negotiate for Sasuke's life with a foreign head of state. Sakura and Kakashi both have opportunities to kill Sasuke in the Land of Iron, and they choose to spare him instead. Kakashi stops Sasuke from killing his only friends at two different points in the story, which would have been a mistake Sasuke couldn't have recovered from. Sasuke would have died in Kaguya's desert dimension if Sakura hadn't saved him (Sakura, who knew that Sasuke wasn't even truly on her side yet, who knew he'd abandoned her for dead multiple times already that day). Kaguya's bone bullet would have killed Sasuke too, if Kakashi, with his intention to die in Sasuke's place, hadn't leapt in front of it (Kakashi, who also knew that Sasuke wasn't fully on their side yet, who also knew that Sasuke had abandoned him for dead earlier that day). Sasuke and Naruto would have BOTH died in the Final Valley if Sakura and a severely injured Kakashi hadn't chased after them to heal their injuries.

Remove any one member of Team 7, and Sasuke never makes it home. Without the combined efforts of all three of his teammates, he doesn't survive.  That’s the way it should be, thematically, for a story whose first and most foundational premise was the importance of teamwork, and since Sakura was just as essential to that framework as everyone else, I’m just as invested in her relationship with Sasuke as I am in his relationship with everyone else.  You can’t remove one leg from a four-legged stool without damaging the integrity of the entire structure, and for me, discounting any single member of Team 7 irreparably damages the integrity of the entire story. 

TL;DR: I love all of the Team 7 relationships, including Sakura and Sasuke's, because despite what some segments of fandom seem to believe, the text of the story never gives me any reason not to.

[fuckyeahisawthat]

There are so many places in the Villeneuve Dune adaptations where he just...takes all the narrative pieces that Frank Herbert laid out and subtly rearranges them into something that tells the story better--that creates dramatic tension where you need it, communicates the themes and message of the book more clearly, or corrects something in the text that contradicts or undermines what Herbert said he was trying to say.

The fedaykin are probably my favorite example of this. I just re-read a little part of the book and got smacked in the face with how different they are.

(under the cut for book spoilers and length)

The fedaykin in the book are Paul's personal followers, sort of his personal guard. They show up after his legend has already started growing (the word doesn't appear in the book until chapter 40) and they are people who have specifically dedicated themselves to fighting for him, and right from the moment they're introduced there is a kind of implied fanaticism to their militancy that's a bit uncomfortable to read. They're the most ardent believers in Paul's messianic status and willing to die for him. (They are also, as far as you can tell from the text, all men.)

In the book, as far as I can remember (I could be forgetting some small detail but I don't think so) there is no mention of armed resistance to colonialism on Arrakis before Paul shows up. As far as we know, he created it. ETA: Okay I actually went back and checked on this and while we hear about the Fremen being "a thorn in the side" of the Harkonnens and we know that they are good fighters, we don't see anything other than possibly one bit of industrial sabotage. The book is very clear that the organized military force we see in the second half was armed and trained by Paul. This is exacerbated by the two-year time jump in the book, which means we never see how Paul goes from being a newly deposed ex-colonial overlord running for his life to someone who has his own private militia of people ready to give their lives for him.

The movie completely flips all these dynamics on their head in ways that add up to a radical change in meaning.

The fedaykin in the movie are an already-existing guerrilla resistance movement on Arrakis that formed long before Paul showed up. Literally the first thing we learn about the Fremen, less that two minutes into the first movie, is that they are fighting back against the colonization and exploitation of their home and have been for decades.

The movie fedaykin also start out being the most skeptical of the prophecy about Paul, which is a great choice from both a political and a character standpoint. Of course they're skeptical. If you're part of a small guerrilla force repeatedly going up against a much bigger and stronger imperial army...you have to believe in your own agency. You have to believe that it is possible to win, and that this tiny little chip in the armor of a giant terrifying military machine that you are making right now will make a difference in the end. These are the people who are directly on the front lines of resisting oppression. They are doing it with their own sweat, blood and ingenuity, and they are not about to wait around for some messiah who may never come.

From a character standpoint, this is really the best possible environment you could put Paul Atreides in if you want to keep him humble. He doesn't get any automatic respect handed to him due to title or birthright or religious belief. He has to prove himself--not as any kind of savior but as a good fighter and a reliable member of a collective political project. And he does. This is an environment that really draws out his best qualities. He's a skilled fighter; he's brave (sometimes recklessly so); he's intensely loyal to and protective of people he cares about. He is not too proud to learn from others and work hard in an egalitarian environment where he gets no special treatment or extra glory. The longer he spends with the fedaykin the more his allegiance shifts from Atreides to Fremen, and the more skeptical he himself becomes about the prophecy. This sets up the conflict with Jessica, which comes to a head before she leaves for the south. And his political sincerity--that he genuinely comes to believe that these people deserve liberation from all colonial forces and his only role should be to help where he can--is what makes the tragedy work. Because in the end we know he will betray all these values and become the exact thing he said he didn't want to be.

There's another layer of meaning to all this that I don't know if the filmmakers were even aware of. ETA: rescinding my doubt cause based on some of Villeneuve's other projects I'm pretty sure he could work it out. Given the time period (1960s) and Herbert's propensity for using Arabic or Arabic-inspired words for aspects of Fremen culture, it seems very likely that the made-up word fedaykin was taken from fedayeen, a real Arabic word that was frequently used untranslated in American news media at the time, usually to refer to Palestinian armed resistance groups.

Fedayeen is usually translated into English as fighter, guerrilla, militant or something similar. The translation of fedaykin that Herbert provides in Dune is "death commando"...which is a whole bucket of yikes in my opinion, but it's not entirely absurd if we're assuming that this fake word and the real word fedayeen function in the same way. A more literal translation of fedayeen is "self-sacrificer," as in willing, intentional self-sacrifice for a political cause, up to and including sacrificing your life.

If you apply this logic to Dune, it means that Villeneuve has actually shifted the meaning of this word in-universe, from fighters who are willing to sacrifice themselves for Paul to fighters who are willing to sacrifice themselves for their people. And the fedaykin are no longer a group created for Paul but a group that Paul counts himself as part of, one member among equals. Which is just WILDLY different from what's in the book. And so much better in my opinion.

[ko-existing]

hi! so i feel so grateful to get here, i wasn't seeking for my true nature at first but well now i understand but like intellectually? like i haven't had that direct experience many nd pages talk abt but before that... do you still "identify" as that SEEMINGLY person even though you already had that direct experience, like after that are we still going to be in this illusion?? it's prolly a stupid question cause if you weren't you wouldn't even make a post in here but... like can things seemingly change after that experience? (and im saying seemingly because I don't want you to see me as someone that sees things "real" just to clarify) like let me put it on an example, this person is like a videogame and the one playing it is the awareness, right? so this seeming person wants to change the game (the illusion) like the whole game design even the character design, is it "possible"??? because "changing" or even reaching for things in the human way, takes too long but isn't supposed to be instantly? idk if you understand me, anyways ty!

I can't tell you the amount of contradiction your text has, Anon.

I'm aware you used the word "seeming" to not sound like you're taking X as real but that's exactly what you're doing from start to end in how you’re phrasing things that are worth looking at — not to be critical, but to clarify for yourself.

You ask, "Do you still identify as the seemingly person after that direct experience?" — but this assumes a person could continue to be real after seeing clearly that there is no separate self. If it was truly seen, the idea of identification itself is seen as part of the illusion. So asking if identification “continues” doesn’t quite land — it’s like asking if the mirage continues to be water after realizing it never was.

Same with "Are we still going to be in the illusion?" — who’s the we? That question puts a subtle split back into place, like there’s an observer and an illusion, but the illusion and the “you” that wants out of it are made of the same substance. No one wakes up from the dream — the dream is seen through, and that’s it.

You also say something like: “Well, obviously you’re still in the illusion, otherwise you wouldn’t post here.” But the appearance doesn't vanish — it already isn't here to begin with. If you look at the ocean and a wave and see both is water, the wave is no longer taken as its false label of a wave but seen directly as water.

The video game metaphor — it's common, but a bit misleading. It implies "Awareness" is something separate from the game, playing it like a player holding a controller. But "Awareness" isn't playing the game — it is the game, the player, the thoughts, the controller, the screen — all of it. There’s no split.

Then you say “this seeming person wants to change the illusion” — but if it’s truly seeming, if it’s just a mirage, who’s going to change what? You can’t upgrade or improve something that was never real to begin with because there is no "you" and there is no "something"

And asking “why does it take so long” or “shouldn’t it be instant?” still operates from the same confusion: someone in time waiting for something outside of it. But if you stop assuming there’s a someone on a timeline, that question dissolves too.

[qiu-yan]

canon jiang cheng

making my own post instead of reblogging someone else's with my hater commentary. praise my three atoms of emotional maturity.

salt below the cut. the post is long so i can concentrate all my salt into one location.

i just saw a post complaining about jc stans trying to take over the "canon jiang cheng" tag. personally, i do think us stans should just let the haters have that one, since picking fights is just going to cause more trouble for everyone. but also.

there is exactly one reason why this is happening, and it isn't just that jc stans are annoying.

in all honesty, the jiang cheng frequently discussed in the "canon jiang cheng" tag is as much of a fandom invention as the jiang cheng conjured by the most ardent of jc stannies. i have seen the level of analysis typical of the "canon jiang cheng tag," and - to speak frankly - the frequenters of this tag are every bit as prone to wild invention and free flights of fancy as the rest of the fandom. when posts claiming that jiang cheng sold an unwilling jiang yanli to the jins, or that jiang cheng regularly whips jin ling, or that jiang cheng directly killed wei wuxian, are all tagged with "canon jiang cheng," it is safe for anyone with a brain to say that we have in fact moved quite a distance away from canon.

so when these people casually declare their equally fanonical interpretation of a character to be the one and only "canon," from the perspective of the rest of us, all we see is condescension and an entirely undeserved arrogance.

is it any wonder the jc stans are annoyed?

actually, let's take a closer look at what's going on here. even if the "canon jiang cheng" tag was intended at any point in its conception to actually be used for discussion of jiang cheng's canon traits - this is no longer the case. in practice, the "canon jiang cheng" tag is used for jiang cheng bashing. if i went into the "canon jiang cheng" tag today, do you think i'd find posts about jiang cheng's canon height or canon love of dogs, or even screenshots of the mdzs text wherein jiang cheng is mentioned? no. every post i found would be about how jiang cheng sucks - and with wildly varying levels of fidelity to canon, to boot.

if every post in your tag is about how a character sucks, and adherence to canon in said posts is optional, then what you have is not a canon analysis tag. what you have is a character bashing tag.

and yet. if you ask these people why they're tagging their character-bashing as "canon," all you get is wide-eyed innocence. this isn't character bashing, they insist, this is just analysis of his canon traits. this is even when the post in question contradicts canon directly. and when posts that are canonically accurate but not jiang-cheng-negative appear in the "canon jiang cheng" tag? these users so kindly move to correct this behavior: don't you know, they politely inform the offender, that this tag is for canon behavior only? your post about how jiang cheng might have had a shred of love in his heart at one point in his life is not canon.

they want at once the exclusivity and full-agreement nature of a character-bashing tag, and also the veneer of superiority lent by the label "canon." and by claiming the label of "canon" for themselves only, they aim not just to lend credibility to their own opinions, but also to automatically discredit everyone that disagrees with them. they want sole ownership over "canon" - and to declare every other jiang cheng analysis out there, so long as it isn't sufficiently jiang-cheng-negative, as mere fandom invention.

guys. come on. what is this? you do realize that if you tell someone that they can't tag their analysis with "canon," then you're basically telling them that you think they're wrong, don't you? every time you say "oh this post is about canon jiang cheng," you do realize that what you're actually saying is "my analysis is based in canon, while yours is fandom invention" - that what you're actually saying is "i'm right and you're wrong," don't you? if so, own up to it! if you're going to disagree with someone, disagree with them openly! none of this simpering "uwu canon jiang cheng actually" bullshit - say with your full chest that you think that everyone else's takes are shit, and why!

if you're going to be a hater, just own up to it and call yourself a hater! don't be a coward. don't be so condescending and disingenuous with your cowardice, either. why are you emulating the cardboard bullshit version of jin guangyao peddled only by the most deluded of jiggy antis? 

and - for once - recognize that if it is acceptable for you behave in a certain way towards others, then it is also acceptable for others to behave in the same way towards you. if you're going to tag your blatantly canon-violating bullshit with "canon jiang cheng," then you do not have the right to get mad when jc stannies tag their equally canon-violating bullshit with "canon jiang cheng" as well.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: Literary & Character Tropes

The word trope comes from the Greek word tropos, meaning a turn or change of direction.

Tropes

Figures involving substitutions of predictable words with terms that deliver nuanced meanings serving an argument.

Now used in cultural studies in a much broader sense as a recurring cultural signifier.

Traditionally the four ‘master tropes’ are regarded as being: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony.

Modern Definition: Themes, motifs, plot devices, plot points, and storylines that have become familiar genre conventions.

PURPOSE: All writers manipulate language to create certain effects. At the level of individual phrases and sentences, the skillful use of tropes is key to creating writing that’s fresh, memorable, and persuasive. Poets might spend hours trying to find just the right metaphor (i.e., a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them, as in "drowning in money") to capture a mood or sensation, while marketers might use antanaclasis (i.e., the repetition of a word within a phrase or sentence in which the second occurrence utilizes a different and sometimes contrary meaning from the first; often found in slogans) to create a punchy catchphrase for a new product.

5 Examples of Literary/Character Tropes

1. all lowercase letters - a stylistic choice in which all text is in lowercase letters. it can be thought of as the opposite of writing in all caps when emphasizing a point, in which case it can be used to give a melancholic feel to whatever you're writing. it is not generally thought of as orthographically correct, giving it (if only in the eyes of advertisers) a casual, hip feel, as if to say you can't be bothered to use the shift key. also used in a visual narrative sense to indicate childishness or, in some cases, idiocy. on a darker note, however, this trope also has a tendency to show up in many an apocalyptic log where it usually is used to denote the point where the unfortunate author has gone insane or otherwise given up all hope.

2. Anti-hero - A character who lacks a handful of the traditional attributes of a hero but is ultimately heroic. They may be bewildered, ineffectual, deluded, or merely apathetic. More often an anti-hero is just an amoral misfit. While heroes are typically conventional, anti-heroes, depending on the circumstances, may be preconventional (in a "good" society), postconventional (if the government is "evil") or even unconventional. Tony Soprano, Walter White, Don Draper, and the grittier versions of Batman are all prime examples of modern antiheroes.

3. Byronic Hero - A character notable for being sullen, withdrawn, hard to like and hard to know, but usually possessing a rich inner life and a softer side accessible only to a special few.

4. Chekhov's Gun - Anton Chekhov, master of the short story, gave this advice: If it's not essential, don't include it in the story. The term has come to mean an insignificant object that later turns out to be important.

5. Unreliable Narrator - In most narratives, there's an element of trust that the person telling you the story is telling the truth, at least as far as they know it. This trope occurs when that convention is discarded. The narrator's facts contradict each other. If you ask them to go back a bit and retell it, the events come out a little differently. Example: Franz Kafka. Due to his famous style, he's able to directly contradict himself within the same sentence, AND make it so subtle that a casual or superficial reader will scarcely notice. The Metamorphosis and The Judgment stand out in this respect.

Sources: 1 2 3 4

If these writing notes helped with your poem/story, please tag me. Or leave a link in the replies. I'd love to read them!

More: Literary & Character Tropes

[marionluth]

What if Peter learned about Harley's existence through a phone call Tony answered in front of him? Excerpt from my Irondad longfic that serves as an adorable stand-alone of Harley-Tony goodness!

Wordcount: 887

* Peter and Tony were discussing something, when Tony's phone rang and he asked Peter if he minded answering. Peter said it was fine. He didn't regret it. *

“After a whole week of dodging my calls, sending me texts with barely-readable Gen Z slang and abbreviations, I'm borderline worried—nevertheless, happy to finally hear your voice, terrorist,” Tony sent into the phone, causing Peter to look up at him with surprised and confused eyes.

“You know what? I’m just gonna say this, and you make what you want out of it… Black bears simply aren’t eating enough people.”

Closing his eyes and letting out a breath through his nose, Tony prayed for strength and sanity, while Peter couldn’t help but snicker at the words his super hearing easily caught. He watched his mentor waiting for his answer, curiosity peaked.

“What did you do, Harley?”

“I mean… I know Rosehill is a town and all, but, dude! Climate change! Shouldn’t they, like, come down from the mountains and look for food and stuff in towns? Desperately rummaging through trash, finding nothing but our civilization's gloriously gross junk food - that even a hungry black bear wouldn’t touch - and then randomly eating a passerby?”

Peter snorted, trying to keep his amused vocalizations at the random tirade quiet, causing Tony to shake his head in terrified resignation at the inevitability of these two eventually meeting each other.

“And when I say randomly, I may or may not mean my English teacher,” Harley continued.

“What have I told you about applying yourself, Harley?” Tony asked, his resigned tone gaining an edge.

“Something that directly contradicts what you've told me about wasting my potential on frivolous things that won't matter in my future.”

“You see, Harley... The English language we're all jabbering away in, especially in those fancy colleges you're drooling over, doesn't fall into the category of frivolous things that won't matter for your future,” Tony stated.

“It's freaking Shakespeare, mech’!” Harley's voice was a whine now. “The man was crazy! A donkey-headed guy getting it on with fairy queens… I mean, come on!”

Biting his lower lip in an effort to keep himself from laughing, Tony took a deep breath, avoiding eye contact entirely with Peter, who was chuckling and shamelessly listening in to the conversation.

"Harley, we've had this chat before. You can't just bail on everything you don't like. You can’t expect you'll just breeze through school without breaking a sweat. You think MIT or Columbia will roll out the red carpet for you if you flunk everything except math, chem, and science?"

“I already got the lecture from Ava, man. Give me a break, here.”

“I'll give you a break when you give me one, terrorist. But until then, park yourself and hit the books. It's not rocket science; we're talking about fairy tales and donkey-faced characters here. If you can crack quadratic equations without even bothering with homework, I'm pretty sure you can handle Shakespeare.”

“That's torture!”

“No, Hamlet is torture. And you know what else will be torture? Whatever your mom and I come up with if you don’t start putting in some serious effort! You got a week to start straightening things out, Harl, or Ava and I will straighten you out instead. Capiche?”

“But wouldn’t it be a lot more cost-effective if you called school -all Tony Stark and shit - and demanded that I be excused from Shakespeare altogether? Oh, I know! We can make it a religious thing… Like studying Shakespeare goes against my religious dogma! That’s dope! They won’t be able to fight that if it comes from you…”

"Alright, kid, first things first: lay off the Red Bull. Second, if you put half as much effort into hitting the books as you do trying to wriggle out of this, we wouldn't even be having this chat. There's no shortcut around it. Buckle down and get to work."

“So that’s a no to my against-my-religion master plan?”

“That’s a no!”

“I hate you more than Shakespeare hated sanity,” came the resigned answer from the other line.

“Study, donkey-head,” Tony emphasized with a roll of his eyes before hanging up.

“I knew you had a kid hidden somewhere,” Peter said with a smirk.

Letting out a snort, Tony shook his head. "Harley isn't my kid, Pete. We bumped into each other a few years ago, and we've stayed in touch since then."

“That sounded like more than just staying in touch,” Peter commented, eyeing the man. “That’s how you roast me, too."

"Smooth talk, as always, Pete," Tony smirked. "I do lend a hand with Harley, but it's a bit of a different ball game. He's down in Tennessee, so it's more of a long-distance gig. The universe is not done testing me, though, and you two will get to meet. He spends some of his school breaks and a couple of weeks in summer here.”

“So you just habitually collect kids to part-time parent?” Peter asked with a small smile and a raised eyebrow.

Tony gaped at Peter as the kid’s deadpan statement registered. “I… don't have a retort to that.

[vorthosjay]

Dear VorthosJay, If you had to make a very brief canon hierarchy outline from your point of view to be cited on the mtg.wiki, what would that look like? Focusing only on the mediums for main continuity and including any preference of new overwriting old.

I look at it like this, keeping in mind this is only my opinion and I haven't thought about it in a long time because it's mostly obvious if you understand the why:

Fiction (Novels, web fiction)

Worldbuilding material (Planeswalker's Guides, Art Books)

Visual media (Card Art, Comic Books)

Marketing materials (Pre-Release Kits, Deck Inserts)

Partner Materials (Video Games, D&D Sourcebook)

Word of God (Author Interviews, Tweets, Tumblr Posts)

Other continuities (Boom!)

Unpublished work of any kind

So, as to the why: it's about what the creative team can manage and to what degree, but also who's job it is to create new lore. Fiction that is directly worked on by the team will generally reflect the vision of the set and story leads. Worldbuilding materials are similar but a lower priority (story comes first) and occasional contradictions may happen (especially as it's often drawn from World Guides, which are written before sets are fully developed, meaning things changed after they lock).

Visual Media has it's own language. For the cards, it has to be evocative as much as a literal translation of the story. It has to be accessible for the majority of people who will never read Magic Story. And it has to make people actually want to look at it. For comic books, the way stories are told is through the visuals as much as the writing, and it requires a different approach sometimes. That means the way it goes down in text and the way it looks in pictures might be different for a lot of reasons.

Marketing stuff isn't always worked on directly by the creative team, and is often locked way before stuff like web fiction due to print needs.

Partner materials: entire OTHER games aren't something the team can have a direct hand in (they have full time jobs already) and will oversee it but not necessarily direct it. Games also have their own ludonarratives different from the TCG's.

World of God may be intent, but intent isn't execution. It's fine to use it if it isn't contradicted, but in a shared universe, the author's vision isn't always going to line up with others'.

Unpublished stuff is at the bottom for obvious reasons.

Now, these are all very broad categorizations and there's wiggle room within them and around them. But in general when you're thinking of canon, think about who's doing the talking and why.

Obviously, new will generally take precedence over old as well, for obvious reasons. And this list isn't a strict hierarchy either, more of a general guideline.

[thedaythatwas]

TW: Hegel.

So, what’s up with Shuake and dialectics? Click below to watch this user (who is not a philosopher) give this (frankly too invested) analysis a shot!

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is the fact that most– but not all– of Joker’s confidant routes involve some sort of transaction. Joker does something for someone, Joker gets a favor in return. Joker’s identity revolves around what he can do for others. He’s got a different mask (haha game mechanic is narrative device etc.) for everyone in his life. 

Getting a little bit in my head about this led me to a (not-all-that-novel) realization: Akechi’s confidant route is largely non-transactional. Sure, he says that he wants to meet with you to talk about the Phantom Thieves, but that more or less directly translates to just wanting to hang out with you. The “favor” that you're doing for Akechi, if we follow the logic of some of the other confidant routes, is spending time with him. (Which is of course also about getting close to Joker for metaverse recon purposes… But I’d argue that amounts to more or less the same thing in the long run anyway). Really, that’s what your relationship with him is, up until you realize the heart he needs you to change is actually one of the big-bads of the game. And at that point… Well… 

Where am I going with this? I’ve also been thinking a lot about Hegel (I’ve seen some really fun posting about Akechi and Hegel on here this past week– thank you philosophy P5R tumblr!). Akechi’s paraphrasing of Hegel goes a little something like “advancement cannot occur without both thesis and antithesis.” Hilariously, this is how he frames his desire to talk to you more, his flirting is just like me forreal I understand him etc. etc. BUT! The interesting thing here is that the game is cueing you to view your relationship with Akechi through the lens of Hegel’s dialectics.

More on that to follow, but first, I want to plug the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s page on Hegel’s Dialectics here– If you haven’t used it before, SEP is a reliable, peer-reviewed source. It’s great. I use it like. All the time. It’s good for getting the gist of big ideas when you don’t have time to read full texts. (Also if I get any of this wrong please know that philosophy is not my field and I’m totally open to constructive criticism.)

Hegel’s dialectical process revolves around three key moments: the moment of understanding, the dialectical moment, and the speculative moment. These moments can also be referred to as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The moment of understanding, thesis, is the point at which an idea is seemingly stable. In the dialectical moment, antithesis, this idea “sublates” itself– the idea is challenged and destabilized because an inherent contradiction in the idea has been made apparent–importantly, part of the idea is preserved. The speculative moment, synthesis, negates the contradiction. A new idea takes form, containing elements of the original idea that was sublated (Marx’s theory of history, anyone?) 

This process continues on and on. Ideas naturally reveal their contradictions, are destabilized, and resolve their contradictions through the creation of a new idea, which is challenged again. This is because the dialectical moment does not come from outside an idea. Antithesis is not an external push against thesis, but rather, the moment when thesis is forced into instability because of its own tightly-bound restriction. 

So back to what I was saying. The game kicks off your relationship with Akechi with a nod to, uh, all of that. Could this be a throwaway comment? Of course! But it’s much more fun to work under the assumption that it isn’t. So bear with me. Akechi is framing himself and Joker as thesis and antithesis. What does that mean? Why do I think it has something to do with Akechi and Joker’s relationship being non-transactional?

Previously, I’ve thought that in the context of their relationship, Akechi represented thesis, and Joker antithesis. This isn’t exactly true (at least per the criteria above) but I do think I was on the right track. 

At the beginning of his story, we can think of Akechi’s worldview as thesis. The world is a stage, and he is a performer. His entire life is dedicated to destroying Shido. It’s a key narrative element of P5 that Akechi doesn’t have confidant relationships (as contrasted by Joker, who has many confidants and becomes stronger through building up those bonds). He views himself as deceiving literally everyone in his life for his goals– his “fans,” his father, the Phantom Thieves. He doesn’t trust, because to him, trust is failure. 

Still, he’s starving for approval, and not just from Shido. You can see the inherent conflict between his desires and beliefs in just about every interaction he has with Joker, particularly those where Akechi overshares about his past. He desperately wants someone to hear him. I don’t think his (primary) aim in that was to strategically win Joker’s trust by showing vulnerability– if that was all he was going for, I doubt Akechi would have been so honest. He omitted information, sure, but he gave Joker the honest-to-god broad strokes of his childhood.  

When Joker comes into his life, Akechi comes to realize that his stable worldview might be wrong. Watching Joker and the rest of the Phantom Thieves reveals the cracks in his own internal logic. Joker has friendships and he is stronger because of them. When Akechi sacrifices himself for the Phantom Thieves on Shido’s ship, we see his moment of synthesis. If Akechi really still internalized all of what he said in his “Teammates? Friends? To hell with that!” monologue, he wouldn’t trust Joker to change Shido’s heart in his stead. To be clear– he probably would have reached this point with or without Joker’s intervention. Joker just happens to push Akechi towards self-sublation a little bit faster.

In Royal, we see a new iteration of Akechi. He doesn’t really regret his actions, and he is still very distinctly Akechi, but we can see that his original perception of the world has made a shift. He is willing to team up with Joker. While he may not place a great deal of faith in all of the PTs, he certainly has real trust in the protagonist. He’s learned that he can be recognized (dare I say loved?) without being perfect, and accordingly, his driving desire for approval has been displaced by his desire to never be so completely under anyone else’s control again.

But ok— that’s kind of an old take. Perhaps a hotter one: I’d also like to propose that Akechi does the same for Joker. 

As mentioned above, Joker’s identity for most of the game is defined by what he can do for the people around him. While a large part of this has to do with the fact that he is a playable character, this is a game, and a game needs to have things for you to do– it wouldn’t be very fun otherwise– it also seems pretty clear that this is part of his characterization. Joker is selfless to a fault. Like Akechi, he is a wildcard who can take on multiple personas. Unlike Akechi, instead of having a handful of personas directly linked to the core of his character development, Joker has as many personas as you want him to. He literally has a mask for every situation. You can equip a persona of the correct arcana to level up your relationships faster– a game mechanic, but also, an interesting meta statement about how Joker bonds with his confidants.

In Royal, however, Joker has the option to do something for himself. His greatest wish isn’t for someone else's happiness– it’s to have Akechi back, for selfish reasons, I would argue. Joker can sacrifice reality to keep him in his life, and depending on the actions you choose to take, sometimes, he does.

Loving Akechi teaches Joker to be selfish. This is especially poignant when you think of how adamantly opposed Akechi is to staying in Maruki's reality. Giving up the true reality to keep Akechi is a wholly selfish act on Joker's part, nothing altruistic about it. And if he doesn't make that choice? Well, don't forget about how Joker spent his wish.

He would have learned how to do this without Akechi– one tends to realize that neverending self-sacrifice is unsustainable sooner rather than later. Again, Akechi just pushes Joker towards effecting that self-sublation a little faster.

By spending time with Joker, Akechi learns that there are people he can truly trust. By spending time with Akechi, Joker learns how to put himself first. Their confidant relationship from this perspective is not only transactional, it’s actually one of the most transactional relationships in the game. Joker actively impacts how Akechi sees himself and the world around him, and vice versa. Their relationship is profoundly transformative for the both of them. To paraphrase Akechi, advancement cannot occur without both thesis and antithesis.

But also, we can forget dialectics for a second. Even without a fun analytical lens, Akechi’s confidant route centers two misunderstood people who find understanding in each other. That’s enough for me!

[bumblebeedinosaur]

Pepper: "Don, what is this?" Don: "What's what, babe?"

The anger is simmering inside of her but she tries to keep a level head. Still she's a little rough as she slaps his response letter against his chest.

Don: "Oh. That. Well, that doesn't matter anymore." Pepper: "Oh doesn't it? Why? Because you're my boyfriend now after a few rounds of woohoo? The only thing you even answered my text for after DAYS of radio silence?" Don: "It wasn't radio silence, I'm busy! You know I intern at the hospital!" Pepper: "You sure seem to be able to go out and about on the town, talking to anyone and everyone else despite being 'busy'!" Don: "What so a guy can't have a social life now? You sure as hell didn't seem to have an issue earlier, you're the one who invited me over! So don't act like you didn't want it, too!"

Pepper: "Oh, of course! So now I can't be pissed off about this SHITTY letter you left for me that directly contradicts what you said before? Both today AND on our first night together? I know what I want, Don, but it's kind of sounding like you don't and now that you know I know that, you're acting like a diva! No wonder those girls sent you through a time machine to get rid of you!"

Pepper gasps as Don jabs a finger in her face. "DON'T you talk about the time machine!! And don't call me a diva, Pep. If anyone is being one right now, it's you. This isn't a big deal. So I felt that way then, what's it matter? Obviously I feel different today, else I wouldn't have said yes when you asked me to make things official!"

[mdzs-fanon-exposed]

Introductory post: Please read! :)

[ON INDEFINITE HIATUS]

hi everyone! welcome to my very own MDZS-specific iteration of the unparalleled @svsss-fanon-exposed and @tgcf-fanon-exposed. this blog is designed to find the differences between canon and fanon in the Mo Dao Zu Shi/Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation fandom.

this blog is ENGLISH NOVEL CANON ONLY. although i may occasionally cite the drama or the donghua as the potential source for any misconceptions, the canons of these adaptations differ too much from the novel canon for my purposes (plus i haven't finished either one. whoops).

how this whole thing works:

send me an ask! is this thing you thought was canon actually fanon? is that fanon idea supported in the books? where? why? how?

i'll answer the ask with a rating, using SVFE's helpful rating system (explained below), and then go into detail. generally a post will include textual evidence supporting my rating, and possibly an analysis of what this means/where an idea came from.

i'll do my best not to introduce my own personal opinions or biases into the posts. if you have any textual evidence that you think disproves or otherwise contradicts one of my posts, i'm always happy to be corrected! HOWEVER. please do not argue with me or anyone else unnecessarily; this blog is not supposed to be a site for or source of discourse. i will block anyone who is repeatedly coming at me with bad faith. i'm doing this project for fun, and i want to keep it that way for everyone :)

posts will probably be sporadic so i don't burn myself out and lose interest. however, i want to try and answer as many questions as i can! submissions will open and close based on demand so i can stay on top of things.

some important things to keep in mind:

i'm not here to dunk on anyone's headcanons, and i am fully supportive of everyone's creative choices in the fandom!! (in fact i have many headcanons myself.) DO NOT harass anyone for their interpretations of the series. my purpose here is just to clarify whether certain ideas are textually supported, NOT to give an opinion on them.

i'm doing this blog for fun, so i'll be treating it as a casual project. i will only be using the official english translation of the novels, with the supplementary exception of the exiled rebels fanlation. i don't speak any chinese, so i will not be using the untranslated raws or any non-english fandom sources in my posts. although i'll be doing research as needed, i also will not be evaluating any headcanons purely based on chinese cultural norms, due to my unfamiliarity with them. if you are more familiar with any of these sources and have more information to add to a post, please let me know!

another thing to keep in mind: the official translation of the novels is not considered fully accurate to the original chinese. i am not immune to making mistakes, either. please take my posts with a grain of salt.

BECAUSE this is a casual project from someone whose only credentials are being completely obsessed with mo dao zu shi and knowing how to write an essay, anyone is welcome to make a blog that does this but. better. let me know if you start one and i'll point people your way lol.

finally: i will NOT be entertaining any character bashing in or on my blog. again, this is not a personal opinion-based blog, i'm looking at textual support, so honestly i don't think this disclaimer is necessary. but. just in case.

💥💥the rating system:💥💥

CANON: what it says on the tin! this fact is supported by the text. if you're trying to be as canon-compliant as possible, this rating is for you.

RUMOR: this fact is an in-text rumor. although this idea is mentioned in the novel, it's still not explicitly confirmed as canon. the characters themselves don't know if it's true or not!

FANON – SUPPORTED: not directly stated in canon, but it's a very likely interpretation, taking into account factors like cultural norms and occam's razor! this rating might be retroactively added to a post previously rated FANON – NEUTRAL, based on crowdsourced information about the raws or chinese culture.

FANON – NEUTRAL: it's not canon, but it's not NOT canon. the text neither confirms nor denies this interpretation, so it's up to you whether you want to consider it true to canon or not. the world is your oyster.

FANON – UNSUPPORTED: not directly stated in canon, but it's a very unlikely interpretation, taking into account factors like cultural norms and occam's razor. this rating might be retroactively added to a post previously rated FANON – NEUTRAL, based on crowdsourced information about the raws or chinese culture.

FANON – CONFLICTING: this idea directly contradicts something stated in the text. if you want to stay as canon-compliant as possible, this rating is not for you.

[nanomooselet]

On Narrators

You know what, fuck it.

I've seen a lot of references to Trigun Stampede having an unreliable narrator, and unfortunately it's activated my media analyst trap card. While there's always a degree of interpretation to these things, there is a difference between interpretation and declaring a banana skin to be orange zest. It makes a difference, especially if you're trying to bake a cake.

That isn't at all what Trigun Stampede is doing. Among other things, it doesn't have a narrator.

Narration, loosely defined, is text (or spoken lines etc) that directly addresses an assumed audience, which may or may not be the actual audience (it depends on the needs of the story). Think voice-overs, think Kuzco in The Emperor's New Groove, think the text panels in a comic or manga that list time and location, or describe the situation. The song of humanity continues to be sung is narration. A narrator is the character who performs narration; sometimes from with the story, sometimes from a position adjacent to it.

Honestly one of the most interesting things about Stampede, in my opinion, is that it makes a point of having neither.

There's no framing device, no presenter, no announcer, no chorus, no soliloquy, not even an internal monologue. There's no direct line to the writers, giving away their intentions. Indeed, the imposition of any text at all is almost entirely absent, save some pointed timing on the title cards, and no character's voice is objective. Zazie or Roberto, who come the closest, can definitely still be wrong - Roberto says Vash is "not long for this world" when Vash is longer for the world than almost anyone else; the man he says would kill with a smile was in fact coerced into becoming a killer. Zazie knows much and is always truthful, but isn't all-knowing, nor operating with complete understanding. And on the other end of the scale you have characters like Dr. Conrad or Knives, where the easiest way to tell they're mistaken or lying is if their mouths are moving. (Outside of brain fuckery. Then you're on your own.) Then there's Vash, who doesn't lie, necessarily, so much as he doesn't volunteer the truth, and tends to dodge giving answers when asked outright.

Now, an unreliable narrator is metafictional, taking advantage of the narrator being a character, and therefore capable of having an agenda.

What makes them unreliable is that they exert motivated influence over what we see - even accidental influence like distorted recollection or misconception. But before declaring such influence is occurring, we need a solid reason to doubt. You don't dismiss an account as unreliable just because it doesn't line up with your own expectations or desires - not without something like a clear contradiction, perhaps, or some conspicuous omission. *

We simply have no reason to believe what we see in Trigun Stampede is anything other than the truth (inasmuch as it's obviously fictional of course). We see some events from multiple viewpoints - here is what Vash experienced, here is what Knives saw, here is what other characters are doing - and what one character sees isn't different from what any other character sees when the perspectives swap. It's just from different distances and angles. The same words are said, the same events play out, and the same reactions are demonstrated by the characters, according to their established values and motivations.

The narrative itself is unadorned and unchanged by their viewpoints. Whether a character is being truthful is simply a judgement you're given to make as the events that occur and their actions reveal more about them.

The term for this isn't narration; it's focalisation, and it's hardly some avant-garde artistic statement. It's intrinsic to telling even the most simple story.

For instance, the way Knives evolves from his initial presentation. His introduction as an adult is as a wrathful would-be god and a merciless killer before his more nuanced motivations and origins are slowly revealed. It would have been different if he'd been introduced first, discovered Tesla and was then depicted destroying Jeneora Rock. He'd come across as more of a protagonist. Instead, because the central character is Vash, we see him first, the humanising struggles of Jeneora Rock's people and Vash's efforts to help them, his anguish when it's rendered moot, and all the ways he suffers as a result of Knives's actions. This is focalisation that makes Knives the antagonist, representing what Vash must overcome. A complex, compelling and perhaps tragic antagonist, but still - not the guy the story is about.

Oh, and that has nothing to do with their respective moral positions, good or evil. It's structural. A protagonist attempts to achieve while an antagonist obstructs, and both by nature will transgress.

Stampede isn't exactly free of ways to manipulate sympathy, and exerts strict control over the perspectives it presents. You could argue it misdirects, or lies by omission - but that's not the same as an unreliable narrator. A narrative is always going to impose some kind of order on events to produce a specific effect, and that does come with bias. But it's the nature of storytelling never to be entirely objective.

I'm not sure that I really have a point, honestly, except that Trigun Stampede is a show that's exceedingly careful to show the characters exactly as they are. It doesn't lie. Personally, I find that more interesting to contemplate than the alternative. We have everything we need to know why the characters do as they do. Certainly far more than some would rather have us know.

* There are two times I think something like this is happening. One is Wolfwood's flashbacks to the orphanage, which are coloured as memories of the softness the Eye ripped away from him. Hence the different art style, and the title of the episode they occur in: once upon a time. It's a fairy tale, more emotionally true than literal to highlight the harshness of his life since then by contrast. There's likely more to that story than Wolfwood is recalling at that moment.

The other, big surprise, is within the memory world. It has manipulative editing, clips taken out of context, video noise, ADR, everything. All you'd need to make it more obvious it can't be trusted is a disclaimer in the corner or inconsistent timestamps or something.

[callipraxia]

A Very Partial Annotation of The Book of Bill

The Axolotl, perhaps unsurprisingly, remains a mysterious figure even after his second-ever canonical appearance. Luckily (?) for us, though, nothing in Bill's ramblings directly contradicts the existence of Ax's metaphysically unstable and perpetually irritated brother the Olm, and he had a few things to say about Bill's latest escapades....

Disclaimer: This post should in no way be taken seriously. This is just me reacting to the book in only slightly delayed real-time, transcribing the sticky notes full of first impressions which cover my copy and elaborating them into dialogues both in and out of character because it amused me. This is about as serious as the Weirdmageddon: The Musical! incident. Also, Olly’s customary underlining has been replaced by a different font because tumblr doesn’t have an ‘underline text’ button for some reason.

Calli: Interesting cover...that's clearly meant to be an adaptation of an ankh in the corners of the book, and that's the same shape as the Emperor's scepter in the traditional tarot, and Ford takes the place of the Emperor in the Mystery Tarot....

Olm: Yes, because Stanford is so well-known for how well he embodies the concepts of authority and structure and the Idealized Father and Administrator. I somehow doubt young Bill made the association. It's more likely a reference to how the book allows him to behave as if he was still alive, to whatever extent.

Calli: I mean, you're probably right, but that's no reason to ruin my fun, is it?

Olm: ....

**************************************

Olm: You spent hours reading the alchemical symbols in different directions and making wild guesses about what they were supposed to be. Those sticky notes will make your family think you have either joined a cult or have become a serial killer if you ever lose track of two of them at once. These are the reasons why I ruin your fun.

**************************************

Calli: ...Yep, Ford definitely doesn't have any ongoing anger issues or PTSD-like psychological phenomena associated with Bill. Shooting the trashcan with a shotgun is totally normal, healthy behavior and definitely not something that would make it...concerning...if teenagers with no taste ever did pull such a prank....

Olm: I presume the loss of a perfectly serviceable trash can took place in the name of that piece of theater. Shooting the book would have sufficed. Or at least not failed any more miserably than the attempt where he did shoot the trash can failed anyway.

**************************************

Calli: ...Ford, you can't just tell me that books can be infected by the contents of other books and not explain what that means. What does that even mean?!

Olm: As usual, he never thinks of the consequences of his actions. Just dump dangerous artifacts in everyone else's realities, why don't you, wash your own hands of it, it's quite impossible that it will ever come back to haunt you after that…

**************************************

Calli: Luckily, this image doesn't pull off the jump scare nearly as well the second time around. Hopefully, this means I won't see this monstrosity in my dreams....

Olm: ...you've written things more disturbing than that, but a simple visual makes you uneasy? How quaint.

**************************************

Calli: Gotta love a children’s book that personifies rivers while offering step-by-step instructions for murder!

Olm: See those text boxes? Those text boxes are why you stay in school, children. One trillion years old and still can't spell...or, for that matter, apparently operate a decent word processor.

**********************************

Calli: ….puppets don’t have neurons. And that ‘chapter you won’t find’ business - what’s that about? Is it a reference to the Barnes and Noble version, or just an attempt to make us all waste a lot of time, or…?

Olm: Yes.

**************************************

Olm: As much as I hate to give him credit, that tangle of symbols probably is the closest thing to the correct answer that you all could process. Not the most poetic expression, but we’ve already discussed young Bill’s conflicted relationship with the written language…

**************************************

Calli: …isn’t that just a description of a normal potato?

**************************************

Olm: …somewhere, amidst all the glories of the multiverse, there is a human who will attempt to fit samples of every item on the Cheesecake Factory’s menu into a blender. It cannot be otherwise. There is at least one human who is doing that right now, in fact, and who will not believe me when I tell them that they will accomplish nothing more impressive than developing a severe case of indigestion at the end of that ill-advised quest. In light of that, I hardly see what the point is to informing you all that drinking fear will also probably give you indigestion, but take my word for it: there are much finer emotion-beverages out there. I’m rather partial to flow states, myself.

Calli: …welp, guess that explains why I’ve been struggling to write for the past two years. Also, Goliath is not gonna be happy about Bill’s picture there….

Olm: And I also look perfectly presentable in a bow tie, thank you very much. If I want to. It tells you a lot about an entity when he does something like claim allegiance to a style of formalwear so recently developed by one species that it might as well be a single particle in one atom in the shortest, thinnest thread of the Great Tapestry of reality…and do let me know if you ever make plans to tell Cthulhu that last bit to his face, Billy-boy. I’ll make popcorn.

Calli: …what use do you have for popcorn? Your most common form is a salamander, and I'm told the next most common one has four faces, two of which are always screaming.

Olm: That still leaves me two faces which can be put to better uses even on days when I can’t be bothered to take a stable form that has teeth. Next question.

**************************************

Olm: Finally! Some reading material that doesn’t aggravate my cosmic migrai -

[Eldritch profanity ensues]

**************************************

Calli: …ok, I can’t lie, that last line...that one kiiiiiinda hurt. Was that really necessary, Ford?

**************************************

Calli: I hate the source, as you all know too well…but man’s got a point about the relative importance of magic tricks and who’s crushing on you in the vast majority of cases.

Olm: Ultimately, they both sink into the nothingness from which they came, never having accomplished anything important enough to be remembered more than a few centuries at the most...but if I must pick one, magic has certainly proven more useful than any of my assorted ex-spouses.

**************************************

Olm: I’ll grant my lying, backstabbing excuse for a sister this much - she never made anyone pretend to be happy about being in any of the afterlives she's presided over. That’s more our brother’s style… Of course, my sister also used keratin deposits from the corpses of her subjects to construct vehicles for one of Father’s schemes, so I suppose allowing the wretched creatures to look miserable really was the least that she could do...but Bill really is too annoying for any self-respecting hell. Perhaps they could deserve each other, but even I don't hate her enough to subject her to that.

**************************************

Calli: …why was the second page so much harder to read than the first one was in my hand mirror?

Olm: The mirror also reflects what it reverses.

**************************************

Calli: ...Ok, I already said it, but this book *really* needs to stop hitting so close to home...

**************************************

Olm: Ah, yes. That incident. Someone remind me to thrash him again sometime for that one. Such a mess to clean up, and Huitzilopochtli is still screaming....

**************************************

Olm: Ah...self-sabotage! Let me sprinkle a bit of that onto my popcorn.

Calli: Am I the only one way too excited to see Powers' agency's card here? To find out they knew about Bill? To find out that the U.S. government once physically captured Bill and took a blood sample??

Pity about the "Bureau of..." bit, though. It took forever to think up the DFSI and now I'm going to have to adjust to it being the BFSI, I guess, and that doesn't roll off the tongue nearly as well.

**************************************

Olm: Oh, of course he'd be tasteless enough to include a photograph of his chess set, mortals aren't even supposed to know that those exist....

Calli: I've written about your brother's. You also used chess metaphors to drop hints in Part III.

Olm: Neither of us is semi-canonical!

**************************************

Olm: I would call that an unusually flattering sketch of my brother, if not for Stanford's unawareness his existence and for his proximity to what appears to be some sort of...aardvark?

**************************************

Calli: Interesting that everything after the first one is dangerously close to some aspect of the truth...I'm gonna take this as a point of support for my theory that Ford really contacted Fiddleford about the Portal less because he needed the technical expertise than because he knew on some level that he was in deep trouble and was practically screaming for help without even realizing it.

Also, I love the fact that Ford is trying to solve potentially prophetic dreams with fridge magnets.

**************************************

Calli: Fun fact! I spent so long looking at charts of alchemical symbols in an attempt to make sense of that row of them inside the front cover that I was actually able to recognize those two in the center of Nightmare Bill's pupil there. They mean..."Vinegar" and "Distilled Vinegar II." No idea why they're there, but that's what they mean.

**************************************

Calli: ...well, at least I've never been arrested for public intoxication and/or committing indecent exposure at a Mexican restaurant. Whenever I feel bad about myself, I guess that I'll always at least have that now.

Olm: He probably hasn't, either. You'd have to ask Zozo to be sure, as I was asleep at the time, but I very much suspect that he is lying. Do you really think something with a bounty like his on its head could just stroll into a multidimensional bar? Or, for that matter, that any even semi-mortal authority could hold him for six hours against his will?

Calli: ...Ok, fair. Especially since the blood in the milkshake machine makes it seem pretty unlikely that he somehow forgot his powers when the cops showed up.

**************************************

Olm: He'd be welcome to my uncle, but he's been dead long enough that I don't think he's coming back.

Calli: I thought you said that you didn't cross the line between hating your family and hating your family enough to subject them to Bill?

Olm: I said that I don't hate my sister enough to subject her to Bill. My uncle, on the other hand...he wasn't nearly as bright as his reputation might lead you to think, my uncle. If he had been, I imagine he would have been more familiar with the idea of self-fulfilling prophecy….

**************************************

Olm: ...He's perfectly capable of speaking normally, you know. The rhyming couplets are just to obfuscate and frustrate and confuse. Though I don't think I can blame all of these on him...'Upstairs' is not a concept that makes much sense in his domain, and the rhymes themselves acknowledge that he…no longer exists inside of space.

**************************************

Olm: And so a god is reduced to a mental patient. A sad old story, that one, but inevitable from time to time....

Calli: ...yeah, yeah, great, but what's this 'Puppet Hour' thing? Why is it in all-caps like that demented "show" Bill made for Ford? And why's the doctor apparently part of the Axolotl cult? This is all a bit unnerving and has a lot of story potential!

**************************************

[free-luigi-mangione]

It’s not illegal for police to test what is discarded trash. Sure, unethical and sneaky but they actually not have to inform him that’s what they’ll be doing when providing the food and drink. A criminal lawyer has covered this in detail on TikTok and said that even if the judge approves this motion then the prosecution just have to put in a new motion requesting that they take a buccal swab and it would def be granted

Not true lol , they can take dna samples from discarded trash in PUBLIC places that are directly in relation to the crime scenes, once you're in custody it's no longer a public place and in custody they can't take dna without permission. From US bar website:

A DNA sample should not be collected from the body of a person without that person’s consent, unless authorized by a search warrant or by a judicial order as provided in subdivision (b) of this standard. Link to the website https://www.americanbar.org/groups/criminal_justice/resources/standards/dna-evidence/#:~:text=(a)%20A%20DNA%20sample%20should,(b)%20of%20this%20standard.

Moreover, the NYPD commissioner has already said the dna are not a match contradicting their own statements in 4 documantery before.

My genuine request: double check anything you see on the internet. For anything regarding law, in the USA you have websites approved by the bar association you can refer to.

really love how fast you sent this in 😂 like i really have two anons fighting very calmly and civilly in my inbox

also about the quoted text, it says "from the body of a person" and we do know that taking DNA samples from a person's body requires a warrant and explicit permission/knowledge of that person, what about public places within the police spaces tho?? what about the situations where people are taken into custody and given food and then their DNA is taken from the trash discarded by them, which in no way requires their body to be anywhere near the trash or the police at the time of DNA collection

and the act of taking DNA from public spaces was never disputed, we're all aware that's completely legal, we aren't sure about the validity of DNA samples taken during the situation i described

and yeah the NYPD has said and done a lot of things which don't match up so we gotta wait and see what comes out of all that

also thanks a lot for the link i'll be verifying any legal stuff sent to me before posting :)

[fanonical]

understanding gwen stacy is transgender in atsv is like. if theres a character in a military uniform in a movie. you assume theyre a soldier if theres nothing contradicting that, right? you dont go "well they might not be a soldier they might just shop at army surplus" unless theres a reason to think that in the text. you dont need to have the character say "im in the army" before you read them as a soldier. similarly if there are multiple trans flags in someones family home and a trans flag visual motif, you need a decent counterpoint to suggest she isnt trans, otherwise you're just being obtuse. and like it could be being intentionally obtuse or it could be unconscious bias. but why do these people feel the need to hold "character is trans" to the highest possible burden of proof?

(also i would disagree with other anons assertion that creator's statements means anything here, if its not in the text in some way its not part of the story)

anon, i am in love with you. i feel the exact same way.

i think it is entirely crazy how people are praising the film for its Black & hispanic characters whilst simultaneously saying it’s “just a theory” that Gwen is trans. how do you know Miles is Black, or Puerto Rican? it doesn’t say either of those things directly in the movie. i know it’s clear from the visual storytelling, but as we know, colours don’t mean anything right? i am 100% sure that some of the unobservant idiots saying this shit will have watched this movie and been like “wait Miles said Spider-Man is Dominican omg that means Spider-Man is Dominican!!!” rather than actually understanding that joke lmfao

this is how crazy y’all sound when you say “it’s just colours” about Gwen, by the way! if you can tell that Jefferson is a cop, that Miles is Afrolatino, that Hobie is an anarchist without being told these things directly in dialogue, then you should be able to tell Gwen is trans, or you’re just looking for some excuse. 🤷‍♀️

[cirilla-fiona-riannon]

My Beloved - Galileo Galilei

Translations may not always capture the exact nuances or tone of the original text. Expect grammatical errors.

Blank, ageless, and suspicious blogs will be blocked.

Mitsuki: "Sorry. You don't need to answer it if you don't want to."

Galileo: "Yes, an old friend."

(An old friend.)

The voice that slipped from his lips carried a tone of nostalgia along with an unbearable sense of sadness.

What Galileo had in mind at that moment was something I couldn't possibly know.

Back in the 16th century, in the Italian city of Padua一

That night, a salon for clergy and intellectuals was being held at a certain nobleman's mansion.

Nobleman 1: "Hey, isn't that blond guy over there the scholar whom Lord Pinelli allegedly supports?"

Nobleman 2: "Galileo Galilei, I believe. He's quite talented, and it seems Lord Pinelli favors him enough to have him stay at this mansion."

Galileo: "..........."

With his ash-blond hair swaying, Galileo turned his back to the scrutinizing gazes of the noblemen.

Galileo: "I had hoped for even a slightly meaningful discussion."

As he uttered a sigh, the surrounding guests exchanged small talk with drinks in hand.

It seemed that there was no one with whom he could engage in scholarly conversation.

With these thoughts swirling in his mind, a man who looked like a clergyman, wearing a rosary, approached him.

Clergyman: "You are Galileo Galilei, correct?"

Galileo: "Indeed, I am."

Clergyman: "I've read your research paper and have been wanting to hear your perspective."

While his demeanor appeared friendly, Galileo didn't miss the provocative undertones in the clergyman's gaze.

Galileo: "It's an honor. What specific points would you like to discuss?"

Clergyman: "The great Aristotle once proclaimed that the earth was at the center of the universe. This aligns with the teachings that God created heaven and earth."

Clergyman: "However, your research contradicts Aristotle's theory, which means you're also contradicting God. What are your thoughts on this?"

Galileo: "That's..."

Galileo: "That's incorrect. This research does not deny the existence of God."

Clergyman: "Oh? So you write such a paper and then say that? Your impertinence knows no bounds."

Galileo slightly frowned at the clergyman, who didn't even try to listen to him after asking for his opinion.

It appeared that this man simply wanted to criticize Galileo's thoughts as heretical.

Galileo: "Faith and the pursuit of science are separate. I am merely seeking the truth."

???: "Hey, Galileo! Long time no see."

Just as Galileo was about to make his argument, he was interrupted by a tap on the shoulder.

When Galileo turned around, an unfamiliar man was smiling at him.

Galileo: "You are…?"

???: "We have a lot to catch up on. Let's have a drink over there!"

With a bit of force, the man led Galileo away from the crowd. They reached the balcony, and the stranger finally released Galileo's arm and shrugged his shoulders.

???: "Dealing directly with a clergyman can be troublesome. It's bad for your reputation."

Galileo: "Reputation? Wait, no, I should thank you. You saved me."

Galileo: "So, who are you?"

Sagredo: "My name is Sagredo. I'm a science enthusiast and a devoted follower of you, Professor Galileo."

Galileo: "Follower?"

Sagredo: "Yes, I've been following your research for quite some time. I've always wanted to talk and meet you."

Sagredo smiled warmly and extended his hand.

Galileo: "I'm Galileo Galilei. Please refrain from calling me Professor."

Sagredo: "My apologies."

They shook hands, and Sagredo's smile grew even brighter. This was the beginning of a unique and enduring friendship between Galileo and Sagredo.

Despite being a nobleman, Sagredo had a genuine interest in science and mathematics.

He became a supporter of Galileo, both as an intellectual and as a friend.

Sagredo: "Galileo, I read your latest paper. It was truly fascinating!"

Sagredo: "But I heard you had another argument with the other researchers."

Galileo: "The argument just got a bit intense. They brought up baseless classical theories."

Sagredo: "I assume you strongly refuted their claims. Remember to moderate your arguments and try not to make too many enemies."

Sagredo: "But I appreciate your straightforward nature in seeking the truth."

Galileo: "Not many people are as straightforward as you when dealing with someone like me, Sagredo."

As their friendship deepened, Sagredo would sometimes take the serious Galileo to a tavern.

Galileo: "Why doesn't anyone want to see the truth? Even if it contradicts age-old doctrines or widely held beliefs, an error is still an error. That much is certain."

Sagredo: "I understand your frustration, Galileo, but these are dangerous times."

Sagredo: "Not long ago, a man who proposed a similar theory was burned at the stake. Be careful with your words and actions."

Galileo: "............"

Sagredo: "Well, for now, let's drink and forget our worries."

To release the frustration of being criticized, Galileo grabbed a glass and drank.

Galileo: "Haah, it's hot in here."

Galileo loosened his collar, looking somewhat uncomfortable.

He brushed his long bangs aside, and his cheeks, tinted in a shade of crimson, became even more exposed. His breath became alluring, perhaps due to intoxication, and his usual stern demeanor was now like a façade as he displayed relaxed gestures.

Sagredo glanced around and chuckled.

Sagredo: "Galileo, you should drink less in public."

Galileo: "Why is that?"

Sagredo: "Because you become vulnerable. Look, the ladies in this tavern have been fixated on 'Professor Galileo' since we arrived."

Galileo: "I couldn't care less."

Ignoring the women's admiring glances, Galileo held out his empty glass, and Sagredo refilled it with wine.

Sagredo: "Honestly, I wonder what kind of woman would capture your heart. If you ever find someone, introduce her to me, will you?"

Sagredo said with a smile, looking at his friend.

At that time, they still didn't know the deep despair that awaited them in the future.

Galileo: "Oh, no! Sagredo, Sagredo!"

Galileo: "Why did this happen!? Why!!?"

----------------------------------

Mitsuki: "Galileo?"

Galileo: "………"

When I called out to him, he widened his eyes as if waking up from a dream.

Then he slowly blinked and reached for his lukewarm coffee.

Mitsuki: "Is everything alright? You kind of spaced out."

Galileo: "No, it's nothing."

Galileo: "Anyway, I got your thanks for the book, so I'll take my leave now."

Mitsuki: "Oh..."

After placing his cup on the saucer, he immediately got up and left the shop.

(I hope everything is okay. It didn't seem like anything was wrong, but...)

After mentioning that he was an old friend, he had a troubled expression and fell silent.

His expression at that moment seemed somewhat pained.

(Maybe he remembered something sad.)

My heart tightened with worry, but there was nothing I could do.

Staring at the empty seat felt futile, so I got up and suddenly noticed something under the chair where he had been sitting.

(Is this his?)

I hurriedly left the store and found his figure heading into the alley.

But in my haste, I bumped into people in the city and almost lost sight of him.

Eventually, I found myself in a deserted part of the city.

(I'm pretty sure he entered this building.)

I saw him entering a deserted building, so I gathered my courage and stepped inside.

There, a room with a domed ceiling and several books spread out before me.

(Is this where he lives?)

Mitsuki: "Excuse me, Galileo. Are you here? It's Mitsuki."

I called out, and footsteps approached.

Galileo: "........"

Galileo: "Why are you here?"

My shoulders involuntarily jerked, startled by his angry voice.

Mitsuki: "I chased after you because a bookmark fell at that cafe. I wanted to give it to you, so I ended up coming all the way here."

Galileo: "........"

Galileo glanced at the bookmark I held out and seemed to want to say something as he accepted it.

Galileo: "You went through the trouble. Thank you."

Galileo: "If you're done, leave."

Mitsuki: "Okay."

(I'm glad he got it, but...)

By visiting his home like this, inviting him to a café, and trying to trigger his memories, I might be annoying him.

(I didn't intend for this to happen.)

Mitsuki: "I'm sorry for following you without permission."

I bowed my head, expressing my desire to apologize more than words can convey, and went to the entrance.

Galileo: "Mitsuki."

I turned around when he called my name, and his eyes pierced through me with extreme coldness.

Galileo: "Stop trying to get involved with me anymore."

Part 1 ╎ Part 2 ╎ Premium ╎ Epilogue