#and it's extremely useful to frame his anger which is partly justified and all a thing that hyrule has to deal with

[thecottageinthedark]

#Legend of Zelda#Breath of the Wild#Calamity Ganon#long post#also hot take but even if we accept the conclusion Ganondorf and Demise are connected#Ganondorf is the one bringing the spite#Demise shows very little imagination in the game and basically just goes 'here's how I win anyway even though you beat me'#Ganondorf is the guy who actually has any reason to be pissed and is. in fact. extremely pissed#and it's extremely useful to frame his anger which is partly justified and all a thing that hyrule has to deal with#as 'merely' the malign influence of a demon because no person would have a Genuine Reason to hate hyrule!

also i was curious, after browsing your meta MANY times (because i love your zelda meta so much!), what's your thought about Calamity Ganon? the game as a whole heavily encourages the idea that the man we knew as ganondorf is GONE and there's a tragic loss of the man he used to be, just a corrupted victim of demise's spite, but there's just as much to indicate that ganondorf is deliberately obfuscating his nature, and he simply sees no reason to be a schemer at the moment?

See my hot take on Calamity Ganon (before I get back to meme replies) is that it's an external manifestation; Calamity Ganon and the Blights are sort of puppet avatars that Ganondorf, the person, is speaking through. They always made me think of ghosts- something distorted but unmistakably recreating a form, an identity- and something is watching you through all of them.

The four blights are tailored assassins. They have prescience and calculation to them, and they use this prescience to attack you. This gets even more so when the big man Clamgan is revealed properly- there's just something about the way he swings his head around to stare at Link the first time that feels injected with almost as much personality as "Oh, it's you," from GLaDOS in Portal 2.

So if their intention was to write a Ganondorf who's completely gone and lost, barely the shambles of a person, I feel like, uh, they failed. Instead, they're giving the sense of a ghost dragging itself out from under the floorboards, especially since if you look at Rhoam's story, at the same time he starts talking about the calamity as a mindless monster, he states without pointing it out that Clamgan specifically outsmarted and manipulated all of the factors that were used to hunt him before.

The Guardians? Turned to his favor.

The Divine Beasts? Again, tailored assassins to isolate the champions.

Advancing from without met an army? He crawls out from underneath Hyrule Castle (which. okay. BotW2's trailer suggests this maybe wasn't his goal, but a coincidence of the location of his prison- but he turned it into a hell of a sneak attack)

Like... he is scheming. Both in a practical sense and in a sense that's distressingly emotionally personal. His various manifestations all have red hair- they're all these attempts at pulling himself back together. It's depersonalized, but in the way that a horror ghost is depersonalized- the self is abstracted, rotted, and yet, enduring. The creepy thing about the Malice to me isn't that it's just hunks of autonomous flesh growing all over- it's that they used eyes- one of the most ubiquitous marks in legend of zelda- and made it that for reasons that are only ever implied to you, the entire setting is watching your progress.

A friend of mine even had a disturbing take that it's possible the Guardians are running default patrol routes only because Zelda is partly sabotaging Ganondorf's control over them- because we see evidence in the past that before Zelda's seal went down, they converged on specific targets. Which, again- BotW is a game where Link literally died, and Zelda almost died- in the Age of Calamity side game they emphasize this further.

The allegedly mindless Calamity recognizes specific people and is trying to get rid of them as quickly as possible. I don't think it's obfuscation- I think it's propaganda and denial- possibly even denial of something Rhoam knows about the situation that he won't tell us- that frames Calamity Ganon as a force of nature, rather than anything that has a reason to be tied to the royal family- or any echo of a person the royal family wronged and buried.

So I'd argue he's totally scheming, he's just scheming with- implicitly- limited resources stuck in a box acting through whatever puppets he can steal and placing horrible flesh homunculi in key places.

[butwhatifidothis]

3H and Bleach: Where the Fuck am I

So, I’m finally hunkering down and trying to write out this post lmao. I’ve mentioned here and there how my personal experience with the 3H’s fandom is similar to my experience with the Bleach fandom’s in more than one way, and - look. Like, I get there’s definitely a semi-universal thing that goes on across all fandoms. I don’t mean for this to say that this only happens within these two fandoms, because duh, of course they don’t. But!! This post is partly me wanting to air years long annoyance towards the Bleach fandom that just so happens to coincide with my feelings towards the 3H fandom, sooo... yeah lmao

I’ll probably be skimming over some bits about 3H, since most people who come across this will already be familiar with what I’d be talking about in that regard vs Bleach, so just a heads up

Note: This is gonna talk about Bleach which will spoiler territory (writing this off the cuff so not sure where this is goin’ yet lmao but I know that much), so if you don’t wanna see that then don’t read this post lol, I know for sure I’ll be spoiling something ahhhh... noticeable, lol

Ableism against the mentally ill

Now, most people reading this post will be familiar with the blog and how this very, very much applies to 3H, but for the sake of this post I’ll lay it out anyway with a brief summary

Dimitri and Rhea are both characters within 3H that suffer from severe trauma that heavily impacts their mental state. Both are the sole survivors of a horrific slaughter, with that slaughter redefining who they are and leaving a permanent marker within their minds in some way (Dimitri with having auditory and visual hallucinations, Rhea with having obsessive tendencies towards bringing her mother back from the dead). Specifically in CF, both characters are set up in the plot as antagonists, with both characters having to relive their trauma in some way due to the actions Byleth and Edelgard take against them (for Dimitri, having his home be razed to the ground and everyone he cares for dying around him, for Rhea having someone use her mother’s mutilated remains be used to end her and her race) and express extreme anger towards Byleth and Edelgard before they are killed to progress/end the story

Now, uh, sad shit right? Not exactly fuckin’ happy sunshine rainbows. These two characters are put through the wringer and are then murdered. They are rightfully not the fuckin’ happiest because of what happened to them before and what happens to them within the present story. But we’ve heard it all before: “They were crazy!” “They couldn’t be reasoned with!” “They had to be put down out of mercy because they were too ~far gone~ to live happily!” “They needed to be killed for the good of everyone!” It’s an extremely ableist rhetoric that gets passed around the fandom as though it’s totally fine to directly state that mentally ill people should be put down if they’re deemed a “lost cause.” Especially worrying because. You know. If they are a “”””lost cause”””” then it’s directly and specifically because of actions Byleth and Edelgard take against them. 

But how does this remind me of Bleach? What kind of similar extreme, worrying ableism exists there? Well, let me introduce to best girl a certain character with... a reputation, to say the least:

Meet Momo Hinamori.

Holy shit it’s so weird writing this out because I’ve been wanting to for years but have never worked up the nerve to do it lol

It should be noted, in the Bleach verse there’s two worlds out of three - Soul Society and Hueco Mundo, though I’ll only be talking of the former - that deal with “souls” (the essence within a living human). Souls age far more slowly than human bodies do in terms of body, not necessarily the mind (so a teenage soul will likely behave as such for a long while) so keep in mind that I’m going to be using numbers that may seem weird to someone who hasn’t seen Bleach lol.  With that out of the way, here’s a similar, if longer for context to those who haven’t seen Bleach, summary for Momo’s character as it relevant to this post:

Momo is a character in Bleach that grows a deep admiration towards Sosuke Aizen, a respected captain of the military force called the Gotei 13. She comes to views him as the most important person in her world due to him both noticing and paying direct attention to her as well as saving her and her friends’ lives during a training mission gone wrong while she was younger. Note that “younger” here means 40 years ago from the start of the story. Aizen would praise her all the time, allow her to sleep over in his quarters, would drape his cloaks over her when she looked cold, and would overall treat Momo as though he was his daughter for most of the time we see them interact in the beginning portions of the show. Note that none of this is sexual in nature, nor is it ever implied to be seen as such. That’ll be important later in this post

To make a long story short, Aizen comes to betray her. He stabs her through the chest and shows and tells her that she never meant anything to him, throughout the 40 years they’ve known each other (which, mind, for a soul Momo’s approximate age 40 years is still a noticeable amount of time), and he was only using her to help bolster his image as a loveable captain so that he can hide his plan from everybody that much easier. He did horrible things to Momo - from setting her alarm clock back to a later time so that she would more likely come across his pinned, bloody fake corpse. to framing her childhood friend for the apparent murder and tricking her into fighting that friend, to far later in the series tricking that friend into stabbing her (hypnosis shit, to sum that up) for literally no stated reason - that ended up mentally breaking her. She couldn’t believe that the last four decades were all nothing but lies and she fell into a deep denial about Aizen’s true nature - someone else made him do everything he did, she must have missed something that would have warned her about Captain Aizen’s unfortunate situation that forced Captain Aizen to hurt her and everyone else. This denial would take the majority of Bleach’s entire runtime for her to get over completely, with her having hiccups in her recovery even as she works up the nerve to fight him.

Now, uh, also not the fuckin’ funnest of times to be had here. The deep, long-running mental and psychological manipulation of what approximates as a teenage girl from a trusted older figure is something that is very clearly horrific and bad of the older figure, right? Like, we’re on the same page here on that?

This wouldn’t be in this post if that was the case. No, Momo was the one constantly on fire for what happened to her. She was one of the most hated characters in the western audience, and there were endless jokes about “lol look at Momo, the pincushion!” “Crazy bitch Momo, better watch out!” making fun of her and her trauma relentlessly. If you managed to find a Momo fan in the early 2000′s you should have also bought a lotto ticket because holy fuck, everyone hated her. She acted in a startlingly real if deeply uncomfortable way in regards to years long manipulation and she was lambasted for it. She didn’t immediately get over decades long psychological abuse and she was called useless, weak, a horrible representation of female characters, stupid - you name it, she was likely called it. To this day I still tense up when I hear that someone likes Bleach and they mention Momo at all because I’m always thinking “does this person think this abuse victim is dumb for being abused?”

Dimitri, Rhea, and Momo are all victim-blamed to a disgusting degree in the 3H and Bleach fandoms. Dimitri and Rhea are always hit with “well if Dimitri hadn’t have fought back against Edelgard/Rhea caused the “”tyranical systems” in the first place, nothing would have happened to them!” and Momo was constantly hit with” well, it’s not Aizen’s fault Momo was so clingy to him, what could he have done!” and I get so fuckin’ mad dude.

But for Dimitri and Momo specifically, there’s one thing in particular that caught my attention:

The “Rejection Theories”

This had my head spinnin’ a bit when I first heard it, cuz I had managed to avoid the theory for a while in the 3H’s fandom, but apparently a sizeable amount of people seem to believe that Dimitri wasn’t just mad at Edelgard in the Holy Tomb because of... you know *waves hand* fuckin’ everything, but that the primary reason for his anger was that Edelgard... rejected his advances to her? And that the dagger he gave to her when they were 13 was a phallic symbol of baby Mitri’s want to have sex with Edelgard? And. Like. What in the fuck are you talking about. 

But like?? Bleach did this shit too with Momo?? It was also a sizeable amount of people - not everyone, but a noticeable amount - that believed that Momo was just mad that Aizen wouldn’t sleep with her? You’d see it pop up in fics so often, that Momo would want Aizen to fuck her and she’d “go crazy” when he denied her and Momo was actually just this shallow bitch who wanted a good fuck like... what.

Like, when I first heard the Phallic Dagger take the first thing that came to mind is “wait Momo was also accused of just wanting to have sex with the person who traumatized her wtf” 

“Actually it was the perpetrators that should be forgiven because lonely and also some shit about ruling better”

Those in the 3H fandom know how often the “Edelgard was lonely!” line gets thrown by just about every one of her stans. Edelgard was lonely and couldn’t trust anyone, so of course she did what she did! If she had someone near her she could trust she wouldn’t have acted like she does in the rest of the game! Nevermind that she “gets” this in CF in the form of Byleth and still acts just as shittily as she does in the other routes, or how being a little lonely doesn’t fuckin’ mean you get to start war. But anyway, we also hear that Edelgard was justified in doing what she did because her ruling Fodlan would have lead to more peace in the end, once she got rid of the power structures in place now (except that doesn’t happen but whatev I guess lmao)

Aizen? He was lonely too! He was far too strong for anyone to truly be able to understand him, and so he tragically fell down a dark path. If he had known someone who could be considered an equal to him he would have never done all the horrible things he did. And the Soul Society is unjust! It needs to be reformed! So him slaughtering hundreds of thousands of souls at the minimum to harvest all of their power to use as his own is justified because it’ll be used to create a more just society under his rule!

Like. Y’all. Lowkey? I’m so fuckin’ glad Edelgard proved herself to be just as fuckin’ awful with Byleth as without because this shit drove me up the fuckin’ wall back in the day. There was 0 ways to prove that Aizen would damn sure be just as fuckin’ bad if he had an “”equal”” to stand by him than if he didn’t, and I get to kinda be right because without fundamentally changing these characters’ backstories they would not give two flying shits about whether or not they had someone “equal to them” (which is still kinda degrading to think about anyway).

Now, this is where I move away to a different topic lol

A split in the narrative cause divides in the fandom

With 3H houses this is really fuckin’ easy to point at: there’s 4 routes, three consistent stories and one radically different story, and that difference in story causes heavy contention within the fandom. It’s very obvious so I won’t go over it much.

But how in the fuck is there a divide in Bleach? It’s not a fuckin’ Choose Your Own Adventure manga, it’s an anime and manga showing off the characters of Bleach’s stories and interactions (with, you know, plot and shit thrown in).

Well. It’s more accurate to say the anime told a story about the characters, and the manga told... the story about the characters.

In terms of plot, the anime didn’t change much from the manga, but hoo fuckin’ boy, did they change shit about some of the characters. Specifically, they changed a shit ton about three characters: the two main protagonists, Ichigo and Rukia, and another main character, Orihime.

Orihime. Got. Fucked.

The anime would make her far more ditzy and clumsy, her crush (turned growing love later on in the story) for Ichigo during more deeper moments that showcases her feelings for him were downplayed if not removed entirely in exchange for talking or thinking about food, key moments she has with Ichigo early in the manga were cut or deadass changed to something else in the anime, some key moments with her relationship with Rukia were cut, her backstory was watered down - so much of Orihime was fucked with in the anime (her fuckin’ introduction was changed drastically). Meanwhile Ichigo and Rukia were given moments that didn’t exist in the manga, they have filler arcs (remember those lmao) that would be stuffed with shit ton of moments for them that have no basis in the manga, other characters would change their behavior from the manga to reflect a sort of “thing” going on between Ichigo and Rukia.

Look, guys, the anime fucked up so bad the fucking mangaka, Tite Kubo, has said he gets stomach aches watching the early anime because it was that awful. And this divide between the anime and manga’s portrayal of these three character helped spawn the ship war of Bleach: Ichiruki vs Ichihime (oh but more on that in a bit). It tanked Orihime’s popularity because people thought she was the stupid dumbass that would stumble ass first into situations when that wasn’t her character at all. And because the majority of anime watchers only watch the anime... yeah, you can see where this went. So just like in 3H in Bleach you have these radically different tellings of the same characters that drove a big-ass wedge in the fandom

Marketing

Imma be transparent, like I’ve said before I managed to avoid nearly every marketing tactic for 3H so it’s a tad hard for me to speak personally, but from what I’ve been told Edelgard was heavily marketed towards the player base pre-release. She was the poster child of 3H, she got the figma, she was in the spotlight - unless you cleansed your board of 3H content you knew exactly who she was. On top of that, it doesn’t stop in-game - loading screen messages would assume you picked BE, Adrestia is the first option to pick when you want to impress one of the lords in the prologue, the BE class is the first option to pick in choosing which route to play, every character has some moment in the game post ts where they express sympathy with the woman who waged war on them for five years (even characters with no business doing so, like Seteth entertaining the idea that maybe Edelgard isn’t that bad during Myrddin). With all of that good PR for Edelgard in and out of the game it heavily impacted how people saw her, and much of it is used by stans to justify her being a good guy (mostly in the game marketing) despite everything else in the game clearly showing that Edelgard is the bad guy

With Bleach in that regard... you have Ichiruki

holy shit it’s so weird talking about Ichiruki i’m still lowkey nervous about talking about them lmao

With Ichiruki stans, they would cling onto outside material that promoted Ichigo and Rukia together as proof that their ship was going to be canon. Spreadsheets, calendars, poems (some of which didn’t even apply to Ichigo and Rukia’s relationship but they insisted they did anyway), novels - outside material that either wasn’t canon or didn’t pertain to Ichigo and Rukia’s relationship. They would shove it in the face of Ichihime shippers that “see, we have all this stuff for us! We ain’t starving tonight!” when the canon (note: in the manga particularly) would clearly show Ichigo and Orihime’s relationship being the one that leans romantic in multiple significant ways. They would latch onto irrelevant shit that ain’t had nothin’ to do with anything and wave around as a paragon of romance when it literally wasn’t even canon

Just fuckin’ ignoring the creators deadass

Creators and developers of 3H: Edelgard is the typical Red Emperor the only difference is Girl

Stans: that’s just a headcanon

Kubo: Ichigo and Rukia have a platonic relationship and I’ve publicly said this since 2008

Stans, now, to this day: Ichigo and Rukia were robbed

Making people reject what they’re stanning for

I’ve seen a few people express that the more they interact with the fandom and see what her stans are doing, the more they grow to dislike Edelgard despite (some) initially liking or even loving her. To put it simply, the same thing happened with Ichiruki - hell, this happened with me with Ichiruki. I can’t fuckin’ stand the ship anymore because every time I think about it I’m reminded of the absolutely rancid, disgusting things Ichiruki stans have to done to others in the fandom, and even after nearly five years after Bleach has ended I still tense up when someone says they like Ichiruki over Ichihime precisely because of the behavior of the stans, just like I side-eye people who say Edelgard is the best lord. Do they like them because they simply prefer them over the other(s) and they’re not totally fuckin’ bonkers, or are they totally fuckin’ bonkers. 

And, like, that’s not fair! I know that! But I can’t help but think that when such a loud amount of people act in such deplorable ways just because someone didn’t like a bunch of lines on paper/pixels on a screen.

To all the nice Ichiruki and Edelgard fans, hope y’all are havin’ a nice day.

Long, crazy ass explanations as to why X =/= X (and if anything actually means Y)

Teacher theory for 3H. How Edelgard totally didn’t hire Kostas to kill Dimitri and Claude and was only thwarted because Claude booked it, but how she definitely actually meant to simply scare away the teacher that was with them so that Jeritza could be pulled from his already existing position in Garreg Mach to teach one class so that Edelgard can kinda keep a sorta closer eye on exactly one of the other classes (and just do shit all about the other one I guess), because Jertiza’d be able to gleam so much from teaching a class for a few hours a day I promise 

But for Bleach, you also have one particularly infamous theory positing shit that don’t real, with enough renown to be known by a specific name, and that’s the Lust Arc = Fail essay

To explain what the essay is about, I have to set the scene up a bit. Imagine, you, with your tiny little monkey brain, are watching Bleach, and you get to the part where Main Boyo is fighting against Villain to save Girly. Other Guy is there too - this is important. Main Boyo tries his hardest to fight Villain, but is ultimately shot through the fucking chest with a laser from Villain and dies. Like, for bit actually dies. Girly breaks down, has a straight up mental breakdown because she always “knew” that Main Boyo could do anything, and now he’s been killed and is dead in front of her. She screams out Main Boyo’s name, hysterically begging him to save her and protect her because holy shit the love of her life has been brutally murdered in front of her what the fuck. But Main Boyo, from literally beyond the line of death, hears her pleas and snaps back to life as a monster, with the sentence “I MUST PROTECT” repeatedly running through his head and being the only sentence he ever says while in this form, with him fucking destroying Villain and even going so far as to directly hurt Other Guy when Other Guy tries to stop Main Boyo from utterly stomping on Villain. Girly is the only person Main Boyo does not directly hurt, and when Villain is damn sure gonna fuckin’ kick the bucket that is when Main Boyo reverts back human. Everyone is more than a little shocked at what happened, but it’s clear from how relieved Girly is when Main Boyo comes back safe and sound that while this event fundamentally will change their relationship (and it does), it is still one that is extremely strong and they won’t let it get between them (and they don’t).

Now, when looking at the summary, you, with your absolutely miniscule peanut of a brain, might come away thinking, “Hm, Main Boyo might kinda care for Girly given that he literally rose from the dead to protect her and only her and went back to normal once she was safe” and you poor fool would be oh so wrong, because actually, this is all proof that Mian Boyo doesn’t care for Girly and that Villain actually cared more for Girly than Main Boyo ever could.

Without diving too deeply into the absolute lunacy of the Lust Arc = Fail essay, that was its main premise. That Ichigo, after rising from the literal dead directly after Orihime begged and pleaded that he protect and save her and then going on to protect and save specifically her (as Uryu - Other Guy - is also a friend of Ichigo’s and got his fucking arm cut off by Monster!Ichigo), is proof against Ichihime being romantic in any way and was not, in fact, a fuckin’ giant neon flashing sign that read THESE TWO ARE GONNA GET TOGETHER. It was the dumbest shit ever, but Ichiruki stans, much like Edelstans with Teacher Theory, clung to it like white on rice. It didn’t matter how much it was utterly debunked, it didn’t matter how the base premise was stupid as fuck, they point to it as the pinnacle of meta for their respective fandoms in their respective spaces.

And all of this leads me to um... the one I’m kinda the most worried about?

Stan Behavior

Edelstans are their own unique brand of awful in that that the shit they spew is particularly... worrying (”genocide isn’t bad if they aren’t human and also they kinda deserved it” “imperialism isn’t that bad really” the mentally ill should be put down if they’re deemed ~too far gone~” among other... wonderful takes...), and their behavior is also quite shitty, harassing content creators that go against the Approved Opinions (Ghast) or forcing people to take down fanart and in general infecting nearly every Rhea space with all kinds of disparaging comments no one asked for. They actively make the fandom a worse space, and when they flare up it’s almost always noticeable (again, Ghast)

Bleach?

Oh boy.

Guys. If you weren’t there for the Canonization of Ichihime (2016). You dodged a fucking bullet.

The outrage was out-fuckin’-rageous. Their behavior was some of the worst reactions anyone has ever seen come from the canonization of a ship in a shounen. This includes, but is not limited to:

Someone tearing apart all 70+ volumes of Bleach and burning it in their bathroom

In fact, multiple people tearing up Bleach and burning it, while keeping the Ichiruki moments and taping it to their walls

A Rukia cosplayer, in Rukia cosplay, printing out the final color spread of the end-game couples and their friends lounging about - with colored ink and all - and burning it, while filming herself doing so

Ichiruki porn being sent to Tite Kubo

Tite Kubo being accused of grooming a 15 Orihime cosplayer with no proof

Tite Kubo being accused of lying about his various health issues

Ichigo and Rukia being drawn cheating on their spouses with each other - and some of that also being sent to Tite Kubo

Tite Kubo being chased off Twitter by Ichiruki stans... again

Ichihime shippers getting sent death threats

Ichihime shippers getting called delusional for thinking their ship had a chance before the endgame couples were revealed, and then being called delusional for thinking their ship had any real basis and wasn’t pulled “out of nowhere”

Tite Kubo being accused of hating women because of Orihime being shown in an apron in the last chapter and Ichiruki stans jumping to the conclusion she became a housewife, and then Tite Kubo being accused of hating women because when it was revealed that Orihime has a job in a bakery to pay for college later they insisted what Kubo should have done was have Uryu, who’s a doctor at that point, pay for Orihime’s college instead of having Orihime pay for it with her own money 

And mind you, this is only the stuff I’ve personally seen and experienced

I am hoping and praying that Edelstans never get as bad as Ichiruki stans did in 2016, but with how otherwise similar they are my hopes are dwindling more and more. I guess I can take solace in the fact that they aren’t quite... that bad yet? In terms of actions, at least? Their sentiments though are infinitely worse, so like... cool

[evakuality]

Episode six: one in which not a lot is different in terms of storyline and things that happen, but in which the wide gulf between these two characters is really highlighted.

Previous episodes can be found here:

Episode one   Episode two   Episode three   Episode four   Episode five

It’s the similarities of the stories that are really highlighted by the differences, and there are some significant differences in how the start of these two episodes play out.  First, of course, is that Isak went awol for a week and we didn’t see him for that hiatus time.  So by this stage he’s been in this state for quite a while, and he’s forced back into contact with people because of school which is still ongoing.  Matteo, on the other hand, moves straight into the next week but he’s able to isolate himself very effectively because his phone is damaged and there’s no school, just exams.  Poor Isak tries hard to pump himself up, make the exposed walk across the schoolyard into something ‘cool’ - like he said to Even way back when they first really talked, he listens to this type of music when he wants to feel cool and confident.  He needs every ounce of that this day, and yet it’s undercut by the kid who bumps into him.  The confident, cool Isak is a fragile facade and it breaks very easily.  He looks pale and washed out and anxious anyway, let alone when his attempt to settle himself fails and his bubble is burst.  Matteo is deep into a weed-fogged haze.  He hasn’t changed at all since Friday and has presumably been doing some variation of lying around smoking ever since he got home that night. He clings to his phone despite not being able to use it and the messages that pour in but which he’s unable to access are symptomatic of his growing isolation.  The things he’s surrounded himself with are things that remind him of David (the picture, cheese sandwiches, though not toasted and not filled with disgusting extras), and that’s all he’s doing.  Blunting the pain with weed while presumably thinking about David.

The rest of each of these scenes plays out differently too.  Partly because of the difference in situation with school vs exams for each, but also partly because of the people who step up at this point.  Jonas is there for Isak in a way that Amira isn’t for Matteo because their friendship goes back further and is more filled with understanding of what is going on in Isak’s life.  Isak approaches Jonas in a very conciliatory frame of mind and he even apologises for how he’s been behaving.  He isn’t yet ready to admit what’s really going on, but he does mention his sleep issues and explains why he’s been so aggressive recently.  Jonas offers at this point to ‘talk about it’ if Isak wants to.  Matteo’s Jonas already offered this, but as I said in my communication meta, he picks the wrong things to focus on: Sara and Matteo’s mother.  So, while they both offer and they are obviously both there for Isak and Matteo, Matteo has a bigger problem making himself talk about it with his Jonas.  Not to mention that he doesn’t lash out at his friends until after Jonas offers to talk, whereas Isak and his Jonas are making an uneasy peace here.  Matteo can’t be sure after the way he spoke to his friends, if Jonas would still be willing.  So, for him it’s not Jonas who talks to him at this point and it’s not his choice.  

This leads to a much different conversation.  Gone is the soft, accepting vibe of Jonas (no-one’s mad at you, we’re just worried) and instead we have Amira and some hard home truths (you have to do something about it, Sara is fucked up because of you etc).  Home truths Matteo isn’t really ready to listen to as yet.  He’s apathetic and uninterested, preferring to stay in his own little bubble of weed and angst rather than try to study effectively and trying to make light of the situation which only alienates her further.  Because his phone is broken and he’s been out of contact he wasn’t expecting this meetup even though Amira did let him know she was coming.  But it means he’s not in any mindset for building bridges and making amends.  Which, we should remember, is partially because he had a week of things looking good and feeling great and it all came crashing down on him just a day or so back.  He came from a depressed place into something bright and hopeful and now he’s been dumped right back into that space.  It’s no wonder he’s not ready to come out of this yet; it hurts and it sucks to feel those good things and lose them.  As he says later, this numbing by the weed makes it all more bearable.  Isak, on the other hand, has been slowly sinking into this for quite some time after a long period of stability where he was at least content with his life, and so at this point he’s ready to start reaching out and making amends with those he’s treated badly.  He’s been in a good place with everyone recently and he wants that back; the bad space he’s in isn’t a nice cocoon for him the way it has been for Matteo.  It’s not something he’s chosen for himself and so he really wants to find a way out of it.

That makes the next few days for him even harder.  He can’t sleep and we see his anger and frustration over that (though I still say his aggression here is totally justified; Noora is being extremely inconsiderate), and then the heartbreak of his meeting with Even, where everything is awkward and no-one has anything particularly helpful to say to each other.  He wants to reach out and connect but he’s exhausted and heartsick and has no idea how to go about building those bridges he so obviously wants.  So in the end he just gives it all up and walks away; that’s easier than trying to make awkward small talk with this person with all the things that are still hanging between them.  Matteo meets up with his friends again, or more to the point they come to see him, and clearly try to help him work through whatever is going on with him with all the talk of spas and thermal baths and wellness etc.  Matteo is still not in a frame of mind to be accepting any of this though; he’s so tuned out from their conversation that his only response to their talk is that he’s going to put on some music.  Then the problem gets bigger again.  They make it obvious that they’re here because they think his funk is because of Sara when for him that was never the problem.  Breaking up with her was a relief to him and this whole ‘Sara’s feeling badly’ thing that everyone (including David) has been piling on him just pushes him further away from wanting to talk.  It’s not even what the boys are doing here )(they’re more focused on him) but because he’s heard it so often he’s getting really sick of it.  They’ve got such a disastrously wrong end of the stick with what’s going on with him and of course it culminates in his outburst that they only care about whether he was having sex with her.  They say he doesn’t talk to them and his indignant response is that’s because they have one track minds.  It pisses him off that everything is reduced to that (and when looking back he’s right; a LOT of what they talk about is sex related, even in this conversation) and none of it is based on anything really going on.  To the point that they have no idea of what that is.

What actually turns things around for Matteo, and serves as his own Isak-and-Jonas bridge building conversation, is when he talks with Hanna.  Unlike the other people who try to get through to him, she’s open and vulnerable herself, admits to feeling overwhelmed and anxious and so he’s able to be open himself.  It’s a moment where he gets to have some clarity and because she doesn’t push at him, he’s far more willing to accept what she’s saying.  It’s not over yet for him, of course, but her quiet acceptance of him and her admission that just because he’s done some shitty things it doesn’t mean he’s an asshole goes a long way to helping him start to turn himself around.  Moving this scene from the final party to here really fits for Matteo, I think.  He needed this here in a way that Isak, with his friends who have been more of a solid presence for him throughout the season, doesn’t.  Matteo really needed to hear that what he did to Hanna has been forgiven and that he can still have worth to other people, and he needed to hear it now when he was at his lowest and when he really felt like he’s an asshole with no hope of redemption.

The conversations they each have directing them to talk to other people otherwise they’ll end up like Ibiza are ostensibly very similar.  But they go to these people for different reasons, and expecting different results.  Isak’s desperate to be ‘normal’ again and to get over his sleep issues.  He wants pills to fix him and make it all feel better.  Matteo just wants more weed to blunt the pain and make everything more bearable.  I don’t think he feels like he can be fixed as such, but he’s keen to keep doing what has been ‘working’ for the last little while.  The people they speak to are both weird and unlikely bearers of the advice they give, though Isak’s doctory person at least tries to get him to see a professional.  Interestingly, he gets quite anxious at that idea and she backs off (probably because she’s not a ‘real’ doctor).  But the outcome for both is that they figure out that they need to open up and talk to people.  For Isak, that’s a scary thought because he’s still worried that telling people about Even will end up in rejection and isolation.  And we’ve seen over this last little while how much isolation is something he doesn’t enjoy at all.    For Matteo, the thought of talking to people is confronting because he still thinks he’s an asshole and he doesn’t want to put himself out to be with people and mend bridges in case they don’t want to mend them back.  I think for Isak it’s more about losing what he has so he doesn’t want to put himself out there, and for Matteo it’s about risking rejection if he tries to reach out, so it’s better to self isolate than to attempt it.  Both, however, are at the end of their tethers at this point and so they both make the decision to contact their Jonas and try to work through it.

The actual coming out conversations are again similar.  They both have a lot of love and support from their Jonas and they both feel relief when they’ve told him and it goes well.  The one big difference is how effusive Matteo is when he talks about David, and the way he describes their time together.  And the conversation Isak has with his Jonas beforehand is much more lowkey, just random talk about silly stuff that’s happened.  Matteo’s Jonas talks about how when he felt bad he did things to make himself feel better and more clear.  This again goes to each of their personalities and what they’re each afraid of.  Isak’s afraid he’ll lose this normal casual relationship with his friends and this conversation is there to assuage that feeling and when Jonas carries on being exactly the same after Isak tells him it’s such a relief for him.  You can see it in his face and hear it in his voice.  Matteo, on the other hand, feels like he’s different and not the same as anyone else so for him the relief is in hearing that Jonas was feeling this way before and that he was able to get out of it.  Like with Hanna, he gets some sort of comfort from knowing that he’s not the only one in this boat.  His ‘I scare away my friends’ to the dealer is so heartbreaking because he honestly thinks this is what will happen if he tries to connect because he’s been so shitty both in the past and recently, so to have Jonas do this in this moment allows Matteo to be easier with being open.  It’s also probably relevant that he had his little boost from David’s picture before he talks to Jonas rather than after like Isak.  The fragile knowledge that David isn’t completely lost to him does fuel a lot of what he says in that conversation with Jonas.

The two boys, while ending up with the same result (coming out to their best friend and being accepted), are so different in the ways they deal with the situations.  It’s still fascinating to me that Matteo is based off Isak and that their stories to this point don’t diverge that much, and yet they are such different people with such different outlooks on life.  You really couldn’t slot either of them into the other’s story and have it work; their motivations and reactions are just too different.

Episode seven can be found here

[profanesnare]

im not doing the full meme because i dont have the energy to do it for random characters BUT i wanted to post some valant hcs so (under a cut bc this is a fucking monster of a post)

also warning for #abuse talk

A: what i think realistically

i wrote this section last bc most of my hcs fall under the other categories lmfao but uhh i dont imagine that valant spends a long time in prison following turning himself in because like, adrian did the same thing (altering a crime scene to frame someone) and she got out pretty quickly? but afterwards valant... doesnt really have a career to return to esp since his last big performance was involved in a murder and the investigation led to him having to reveal the technique used lol. sucks 2 be him

B: what i think is fucking hilarious

so ive talked about this before but hes got a Thing about like... having a very defined stage persona and not breaking character but also, you cant... wear magician clothes 24/7 you gotta have other Options so when he doesnt have the energy to be in-character and has to go like, get groceries or leave his apartment to do laundry or w/e he presents differently to the point of being unrecognizable (i imagine he styles his hair for shows and wears it differently when ooc and just, has super different mannerisms and body language and speech style) 

and generally he avoids places he spends time in while ic so that people dont recognize him but like i imagine he probably has a side job? since his magic gigs canonically aren’t super popular

so im imagining him working at like, a grocery store or w/e and one time hes working and phoenix goes to his register to buy sth and its extremely uncomfortable because both of them kind of recognize the other esp bc i like to imagine theyd like... talked to each other a bit since phoenix’s disbarment because of valant visiting trucy (see below) and overall its very awkward and neither of them want to make eye contact and it never gets mentioned again

C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends

valant’s concept of family is very Fucked and also hes got issues, w/ authority mostly stemming from apprenticing under magnifi for a long period of time... i think it’s safe to say that magnifi was canon abusive to the other gramaryes and like, i v strongly hc valant as borderline which Doesnt Help lmao

and i know theres 0 canon info about valants life outside of his work so i can make up whatever i want so i say he isnt in touch with his bio family and didnt get along with them very well so when he was around 16-17 he just basically moved in with thalassa and magnifi (i havent worked out where zak fits into this yet) and magnifi became very much an Unpleasable Dad Figure that valant idolized and i think that valant was like.... aware that a lot of the way magnifi treated his apprentices and his daughter was not at all okay or defensible but didnt really want to admit it, and magnifi’s death didnt make that any easier lmfao

also this only sort of related but i want to include it- valant idealized zak for a long time and the similarities between zak and magnifi dont help with that, and i like to think that the two of them became v close after thalassa ran away? and neither of them really expected her to come back

and zak and thalassa getting married (? i dont remember if they officially got married in canon but i kind of assume they did) after her returning definitely felt like a betrayal from zak at least, i dont think valant blamed thalassa for it at all but it definitely solidified in valants mind that he was Unnecessary and like, i know zak is pretty objectively an asshole but imo valant didnt think of him that way despite splitting on him? valant interpreted those feelings more as jealousy than as like, justified anger on his part bc zak was the favored one, the Good one, and over time valant just. increasingly sort of accepted that he couldn’t be on zak’s level and that lead to a lot of bitterness

i have Thoughts about thalassa’s “death” also but this is super long already so i’ll save it for another post

D: what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so i believe it anyways

ok the fact that theres a four year age gap between valant and thalassa and valant and zak is BULLSHIT imo and i hate... female characters being markedly younger than men who are into them lmao and also theres no fucking reason they cant be the same age, it changes NOTHING about canon aside from making things a little less fucky So i like to just. pretend they were all born around 85-87 and knew each other as teenz

but also. what is even more bullshit is valant not visiting trucy for 7 years, what the fuck capcom i will fight you over this

SO gimme valant staying in touch with the wrights and like, its a bit weird because he knows phoenix is struggling financially and its kiind of his fault but phoenix feels really weird about accepting money from him because hes aware that valant is also struggling so mostly what happens is that valant like, periodically invites trucy and phoenix to like, get pancakes or go to festivals and its partly an Advertising opportunity for valant because he can be in persona and do tricks and usually there is some kind of small crowd around them by the end of it and trucy loves it and phoenix Hates it

just.... give me positive valant-trucy interactions ;________;

[ganymedesclock]

also i was curious, after browsing your meta MANY times (because i love your zelda meta so much!), what's your thought about Calamity Ganon? the game as a whole heavily encourages the idea that the man we knew as ganondorf is GONE and there's a tragic loss of the man he used to be, just a corrupted victim of demise's spite, but there's just as much to indicate that ganondorf is deliberately obfuscating his nature, and he simply sees no reason to be a schemer at the moment?

See my hot take on Calamity Ganon (before I get back to meme replies) is that it's an external manifestation; Calamity Ganon and the Blights are sort of puppet avatars that Ganondorf, the person, is speaking through. They always made me think of ghosts- something distorted but unmistakably recreating a form, an identity- and something is watching you through all of them.

The four blights are tailored assassins. They have prescience and calculation to them, and they use this prescience to attack you. This gets even more so when the big man Clamgan is revealed properly- there's just something about the way he swings his head around to stare at Link the first time that feels injected with almost as much personality as "Oh, it's you," from GLaDOS in Portal 2.

So if their intention was to write a Ganondorf who's completely gone and lost, barely the shambles of a person, I feel like, uh, they failed. Instead, they're giving the sense of a ghost dragging itself out from under the floorboards, especially since if you look at Rhoam's story, at the same time he starts talking about the calamity as a mindless monster, he states without pointing it out that Clamgan specifically outsmarted and manipulated all of the factors that were used to hunt him before.

The Guardians? Turned to his favor.

The Divine Beasts? Again, tailored assassins to isolate the champions.

Advancing from without met an army? He crawls out from underneath Hyrule Castle (which. okay. BotW2's trailer suggests this maybe wasn't his goal, but a coincidence of the location of his prison- but he turned it into a hell of a sneak attack)

Like... he is scheming. Both in a practical sense and in a sense that's distressingly emotionally personal. His various manifestations all have red hair- they're all these attempts at pulling himself back together. It's depersonalized, but in the way that a horror ghost is depersonalized- the self is abstracted, rotted, and yet, enduring. The creepy thing about the Malice to me isn't that it's just hunks of autonomous flesh growing all over- it's that they used eyes- one of the most ubiquitous marks in legend of zelda- and made it that for reasons that are only ever implied to you, the entire setting is watching your progress.

A friend of mine even had a disturbing take that it's possible the Guardians are running default patrol routes only because Zelda is partly sabotaging Ganondorf's control over them- because we see evidence in the past that before Zelda's seal went down, they converged on specific targets. Which, again- BotW is a game where Link literally died, and Zelda almost died- in the Age of Calamity side game they emphasize this further.

The allegedly mindless Calamity recognizes specific people and is trying to get rid of them as quickly as possible. I don't think it's obfuscation- I think it's propaganda and denial- possibly even denial of something Rhoam knows about the situation that he won't tell us- that frames Calamity Ganon as a force of nature, rather than anything that has a reason to be tied to the royal family- or any echo of a person the royal family wronged and buried.

So I'd argue he's totally scheming, he's just scheming with- implicitly- limited resources stuck in a box acting through whatever puppets he can steal and placing horrible flesh homunculi in key places.