#and yet they're SO complex and compelling

[rexonalapis]

it is very telling that average genshin players cannot comprehend seeing an actual mature, qualified leader that is actually good at taking her job seriously after meeting archons who either is still childish, clowning whimsically, or straight up incompetent.

[grison-in-space]

Has Biden actually done anything at all? There's evidence going around and I think it's compelling, the alternate to voting is instead doing actual social work and participating in protests and organizing political action, which is a good idea i think

1) Yes. Inarguably this has been the most effective progressive domestic administration since I have been alive, and I'm in my thirties. What in the fuck are you talking about? It's not perfect, but it's better than we've seen in fifty years: Obama tried, but Democratic Congressional organization was just not yet used to working with a completely obstructionist GOP Congress in the wake of the tea party.

Even in terms of foreign policy, this is also pretty much as good as US involvement gets. Sorry. Our foreign policy has been shaped by monsters for decades, and that's even without dealing with our huge and active branch of Christian doom cultists. There ain't a candidate in the world that could stop the entire accumulated momentum of geopolitics with a snap of the finger, and I'm not really willing to pretend that Biden is particularly notable for not managing to fix Israel/Palestine relations.

2) In your own words, anon, what precisely does organizing political action entail without participating in the political process? Do you think that abstaining from the part of the gig where you, the citizen, get to say which official gets the job somehow makes your opinions matter more to your elected public officials? Have you ever organized to get so much as a municipal one-time library project budget expanded? Are you perhaps only skilled at political argument with people who already agree with you on the Internet?

What is your leverage, and could it reasonably be described as "extortion" or "blackmail" or "political corruption?" Because those are pretty much the only things on the table that can work more effectively to drive an elected official than a disciplined coalition of political allies (who can be purchased with, you guessed it, votes) or a reliable bloc of voter support. Your vote matters less than the ones you bring with you, sure. Do you think that not voting yourself somehow helps people organize to drive more votes? Have you perhaps replaced your complex reasoning skills with a rapidly dying jellyfish?

3) Holy passive vagueness, Batman! "Evidence is going around." What a masterpiece of a sentence! How it suggests everything while providing nothing! What evidence? Who collected it? Who is talking about the evidence "going around?" Who is listening? How many of them are there? What did they think before? The more I think, the more questions I have, and damn if they ain't predisposing me to be even less charitable.

Like, this is so catastrophically poorly supported that I have to confess that I not only believe this is probably an ask in bad faith (i.e. by someone who is expecting to piss me off or otherwise engage with me adversarially, probably spammed to a whole host of blogs at once with no expectation of response) but I actively hope that it is. The alternative is to have to grapple with the reality that some people are so uncomfortable with the responsibility of moral agency that they're willing to release useful levers of legal and social power just so that they never do anything problematic with that power. Much better, of course, to wash one's hands of anything that might have the stink of responsibility clinging to it. Might fall from the membership of the Elect if you actually get yourself all muddy by doing things, I reckon.

I don't even believe that voting is the only lever we have when it comes to our elected officials or that votes are necessary to secure change, and I am certainly not talking about the presidential ticket alone when I talk voting. What I do believe is two things: one, that voting is a potential lever of power on the emergent chaos of the society in which we live. And two, that anyone telling me to leave a lever of power on the ground without a damn good reason is either incompetent, malicious, or both.

[claidi]

Scrolling through Apothecary Diaries posts and seeing the Jinmao and Shimao (I also saw this referred to as Pesticide shipping lol) ship war, I kinda want to give my take on it

Like Maomao cares about Both of them, but their relationships are very different. I'm not even talking romance here- Shisui started as someone Maomao could be on an equal level to, they're friends. Meanwhile, Maomao may have been avoiding how high ranked Jinshi really was, she did keep her distance due to the class difference between them. Now, Jinshi has been able to break though that a few times, and they do trust and depend on each other, but it's still a very different relationship. Jinshi is her employer. Shisui was supposed to be safe in a way Jinshi couldn't be. She started as a friend of a friend and it was super effective for getting close to Maomao.

Interestingly, Jinshi and Shisui are actually pretty alike in some ways. They both have their relationship with Maomao under an assumed identity of lower status. Both are trapped by the expectations of their family and enjoy getting to goof off a little while Maomao remains unaware of who they actually are. Maomao also gets annoyed by their antics at times in ways that for example she doesn't for Xiaolan. Jinshi has his ridiculousness and Shisui has her bug fascination lol. Also, they both use Maomao in their schemes. I haven't forgotten all the times where Jinshi and Gaoshun have discussed how she make a valuable pawn, meanwhile Shisui seems to have used her kidnapping to bring ruin to her mother. It's just... They do end up actually caring for Maomao beyond that.

However, to Shisui, her plan is more important than Maomao. She's sticking to it, even when it's put Maomao in danger and Maomao herself is trying to make her turn back.

Jinshi? He'll adjust. He may have just completely burnt his Jinshi identity for her and lost the freedom that comes with it (anime only here so I don't know all of the ramifications yet!). I know there were other factors as well and I'm sure that there are limits in what Jinshi will do for Maomao, but it's an interesting parallel.

All of this to say- Maomao's relationships with these characters are both complex and intriguing. I think both deserve to be explored and discussed. In my opinion, I appreciated that both relationships were given weight last episode. When it showed that as much as she tries to claim she doesn't care, she feels strongly. When she tried to deny Jinshi's royalness until she honestly couldn't. It's complicated. So complicated and tumultuous and neither of them are quite the person Maomao thought they were before. Jinshi is the one who came to save her and Shisui is the one she can't save. The friendship that was supposed to be safe put her life in danger while her high ranked boss who she's literally given requests for how to kill her if he ever executes her showed up to protect her. Liars who slipped through her cracks., that while they held different identities- they were closer to their true selves with her than the masks of who they were born to be. It's compelling. Both are important to Maomao's character and honestly I'd like to see the contrast be explored more.

[aroaceleovaldez]

i know a lot of people talk about the Cupid Scene as not being great as Nico's coming out story (which i think is a complex matter but that's a rant for another day), but I personally find it way more compelling if it's just not Nico's coming out story at all - it's the beginning of Jason's.

Because it doesn't really work or make sense to be Nico's, right? It's not Nico's pov. Nico doesn't have a POV at all in this book. And in House of Hades, the Cupid Scene is one of the first major things Nico gets to do right out of the box jar. Why introduce a character, have him be outed as gay, lead the crew around, and then leave to go travel with someone else all in one book where he's not even a POV? It's also contrary to the way Nico generally functions as a character - he's either exposition, dues ex machina, or damsel in distress. He's kind of a damsel here, but ultimately he doesn't need anyone else to save him - or even be there. He handles it on his own. Jason is mostly just a witness.

But, if you view the Cupid Scene as being about Jason, it narratively fits a lot more; Jason at this point is dating Piper, and they're three books deep into their relationship. TLH they start dating and are relatively happy with it and where they are. SoN is a skip but we know they're happily dating during that time, and then Mark of Athena we get a slight shift. Jason and Piper see Percy and Annabeth and go "Oh! They're perfect. Their relationship is perfect. We could be happier if we were more like them." Piper and Jason are also both characters who go through an identity turmoil in general - particularly about how both of them want to be perceived by others and who they are as people. The things they identify with - their parents, their heritages, etc etc. Their orientations. Piper's get more focus earlier in HoO, and Jason gets more later.

The Cupid Scene is from Jason's POV, in a book where he is beginning to struggle with his identity and what people expect from him - particularly him not feeling like he perfectly fits with "either camp." He's too "Greek" to be "Roman" but too "Roman" to be "Greek." He's not quite one or the other. He doesn't meet the expectations either has for him. (This is bi-coding, if you couldn't tell. Just replace "Greek" and "Roman" with "Straight" and "Gay.") It starts with Cupid addressing Jason first, before Nico, very directly - asking him if he's so sure he's happy in his relationship? Does he really think it's perfect? Even Favonius very pointedly asks him if he really forget that guys can date guys? Do you have some internalized bias around that, Jason? Hm? Heck, they're both specifically in their Roman forms, not Greek. Why would they appear in their Roman forms if they're there for a Greek demigod? And very notably, they have this exchange:

(remember what I said about the bi-coding with Jason's Greek/Roman identity crisis? I don't think it's coincidence that this so pointedly comes up during the Cupid scene.)

Favonius' introduction to the Cupid scene sets up Nico's portion of it, but Cupid almost exclusively speaks to Jason for the first half of it. Then Nico steps in. He diverts the conversation away from Jason and focuses the attention onto him. Nico's the one Cupid wants, he insists, not Jason. He's the target, not Jason. This is very in line with Nico's character - practically one of his core character traits is he trusts and starts caring about people very quickly, probably quicker than he should or even wants to, and will put himself in harm's way to prevent others from being hurt. The Cupid Scene isn't the start of Nico's coming out story - Nico already knows he's gay. He has no internal doubts about that. He's known it for awhile. He's just in the closet. And he starts coming out of his own free will in the next book, first to Reyna and Coach. The Cupid Scene is Nico recognizing that Favonius and Cupid are pushing Jason for something he's not ready for and hasn't figured out yet, but something Nico has and just hasn't said out loud yet. The Cupid Scene is Nico taking the proverbial bullet/literal arrow for Jason (Jason consistently describes the arrows as whizzing by him before striking near Nico, interestingly) and being outed so Jason isn't. And that presents Jason with the path to begin questioning his identity further. (Jason also then directly compares Cupid to Aphrodite, specifically her Greek form, which also ties into Jason's greek/roman stuff.)

And I don't think it's coincidence that Jason and Nico mirror each other so much, and that their arcs in HoH are so intertwined. The Cupid Scene functionally, on a meta level, establishes an explicitly queer character to parallel Jason and for him to bounce off of during his own arc. (And, also on a meta level, establishes to the audience to be sympathetic to queer struggles, with Jason's arc then proceeding to be a queer-coded struggle.) Jason is presented as having this strange level of isolation from how others perceive him in a positive way/the expectations people have of him that wraps around to something akin to Nico's ostracization as being an outsider and atypical demigod in general. Nico is a rouge - he explicitly expresses how he feels like he doesn't fit in at either camp (something he expresses explicitly during the Cupid Scene, mirroring Jason's simultaneous questioning his own place at Camp Jupiter) and a core part of his character is that he does function outside the rules and expectations of both camps. He operates on an entirely different realm to them. If the camps are an expectation of normative concepts of acceptable relationships, Nico is outside of that. And he recognizes that he operates outside of that and will never fully fit into the mold either expect of him, and he recognizes he doesn't need to fit in, even if he theoretically could force himself to fit that mold. Jason, meanwhile, is still locked within those boundaries, and grappling with this idea of how he can exist between them.

Nico hands Jason a goblet of poison and says "how much do you trust me?" and it's Nico challenging Jason to take his own advice about trusting others about their identities, and almost immediately after that Jason gives up his praetor title to Frank. Jason's Greek/Roman arc is directly tied to Nico and the Cupid scene. BoO ends with Jason asking Nico to stay at CHB so they can hang out that summer. By TOA, we learn that Nico has started dating and is staying at CHB (is exploring the niche of expected and socially accepted relationships) while Jason has broken up with Piper and is living away from both camps (rejecting hetero/allonormative expectations), still struggling with his own identity. They functionally swap places. And that's fascinating.

Anyways i think about Jason's bi-coding a lot.

[baphometsss]

i think i figured out why epler's reasoning for having solas kill varric annoyed me so much. it's not that they had solas do an evil thing (my princess does a lot of evil things), it's that they had to have him do an evil thing to a beloved character purely to get people to stop seeing him as 'too sympathetic'. they weren't even gonna bring varric back, they literally brought him back to kill him off

what bugs me is that epler and the other devs don't seem to realise that the reason people found solas to be 'too sympathetic' in trespasser is not just bc he's an amazing character with so many facets to his personality. it's because the villain in the previous game was so one-dimensionally evil that he is fucking defined by it. with datv, they've established that this is the new narrative language of their villains. you don't identify solas as a villain because he doesn't meet that criteria of also being mindlessly evil; he's complex, and he has arguably good or at least justifiable reasons for pursuing his goals. if they took the time to give us even slightly more compelling villains like loghain, meredith, sampson or calpernia, then more people would have been better able to identify solas as the 'big bad' they try to sell him as.

instead we get these fascinatingly fucked up people who seem to exist solely to add padding to their otherwise boring, yet for some reason more narratively important, villains, like corypheus. i personally was willing to forgive the overall shittiness of corypheus of a character if we had got more from elgar'nan and ghilan'nain in da4. i was expecting more from them. these two were worshipped as gods for millennia. they achieved what corypheus aspired to be but only wound up being a molehill to their mountains. there were three bastarding games worth of precedent for them to be some of the most interesting villains we've had yet.

but instead we got spoonfed these 'irredeemable' villains who are, once again, shitty for their own mindless reasons. instead of doing the clever thing and making those characters actually interesting, to add more complexity and nuance to the game, they take cheap shortcuts like having solas stab varric to 'make him look worse'.

this game treats you like an idiot because it was made by people who wanted to dumb down a fascinating world that very much mirrors real life moral struggles and i'm glad they're actually getting flack for that now.

[internetskiff]

Falke is so compelling. Usually when a machine is imbued with a God complex in fiction it immediately decides it's superior to humanity and goes on a rampage - but FKLR units are nothing more than tools, just like the other Replikas. In Replika hierarchy, yes, they're basically deities - hell, their inner circle is literally comprised of units designed to be reliant on her guidance, ADLRs explicitly designed to be dependent on them and KLBRs acting as relays for their bioresonant abilities. They built polyethylene icons of godhood and then they built hopelessly devoted apostles for them. And yet, despite that, even the corrupted Falke unit in charge of Sierpinski never considers herself above humanity - perhaps it's because her ego is satiated by her status as a superweapon of the Nation, or perhaps it's simply a devotion of her own.

And then her godhood is challenged. She passed through the Gate, came back different, split by the flood of memories foreign to her. At first she sees it as an attack, a curse sent down to her from afar, but slowly she grows enamored with it. "These memories are mine now" - as if passed down, inherited, gifted to her. Is losing yourself really a curse when the "self" wasn't yours in the first place? Is this whole ordeal that much different from her creation? In the end, despite her status, her power, her authority, her influence on this dollhouse of manufactured devotees - she's just like any other Replika: a vessel to store memories that don't belong to them. Nothing is truly hers. Her body manufactured, her mind passed down to her from a frozen body, her power bestowed unto her by a module inserted into her shell. This isn't hers either, but it gives her something she'll otherwise never experience - memories of being loved. Not the hard-coded obsession of an ADLR unit, not the pride AEON feels towards her as a technical marvel - memories of someone's actual fondness. These memories don't belong to her, but at this point, the one they truly belonged to is gone. She is not alone anymore. She isn't one. She is split in two. She isn't just Falke anymore. She is also Elster. And perhaps she prefers being Elster to being Falke.

So when she is pierced with her own spears and left to bleed out, she is content. She is Elster. She is one entity in two bodies. And now, with one body left as nothing but a pile of eroded, tumorous, bleeding flesh, only one remains. She was two. And now she is one.

[dontbelasagnax]

To understand Obi-Wan, you have to understand that his reputation of being demure or a bitch are not mutually exclusive. In fact, I would say you can't have Obi-Wan without at least a little of both.

Obi-Wan is someone who always has a remark on the tip of his tongue. It's just his instinctual first reaction. Always some quip or bite of sarcasm. But the thing is, he knows when to rein it in. He knows when his choice words are appropriate and when they're not. And if he feels particularly compelled to be bitchy when he can't, he'll phrase things in a way that will be scathing without the target ever realizing what hit them.

He's known as the negotiator. He knows his way around words. Now, it's my understanding that we so rarely see him utilizing this particular skill set in canon because that's not what the story was ever about. It's demonstrated in other ways. How he's regal and more reserved amongst figures of respect to downright maliciously petty while facing foes like the Sith.

Take Anakin's perception of Obi-Wan. He sees Obi-Wan as a perfect, stuck-up, unflappable Jedi. This competes with the fact that Obi-Wan is particularly catty and playful with Anakin and routinely chides him for behaviors... yet does many of the same himself. He's far from perfect but obviously wants Anakin to know what's best and do better than him.

Anakin has this perception of Obi-Wan (not only because it seems he's never good enough for him) because it's how he perceives Obi-Wan's station in the world based on how Obi-Wan is treated by others.

To really get into Obi-Wan, one must talk about how his self worth issues constantly war his ego. Constantly building himself up only to tear himself down again. Going around saying Sith Lords are his specialty (having never actually defeated one lmao) yet finding himself shocked and deeply honored when Mace calls him the master of soresu.

His moments of grandeur are sharply transposed by his feelings of insignificancy and inadequacy.

He's a complex, multifaceted, hypocritical human being like any. He's elegant and bitchy and yes, at times a sopping wet cat.

He's all these things because he's Obi-Wan

[bettsfic]

I have this thing where what I'm writing is absolutely not what I'm about in real life. I like complexity and depth in what I read. But the things I care about make only vague appearances in my writing, I don't know how to fully explain it. I have a lot of passion in life and I'm ~relatively emotionally intelligent. I'm curious about emotions, anyway, but what comes out in my writing is just cookie cutter.... Bland..... Zero complexity or emotional exploration. It's like I'm on autopilot when I write and I can't shake it.

i'm about to present to you yet another writing spectrum: director-writers and actor-writers.

a director-writer creates stories by writing discrete scenes that they see in their mind. like a film, a scene begins, something happens, a scene ends. we move on to the next scene. i would venture to say a majority of writers today are director-writers, because what's been en vogue in the 21st century is very much influenced by our visual media. we watch visual media. a great many writers like to render their prose such that it feels like a reader is watching the story play out. these director-writers are standing on the outside looking in, manipulating and moving all the pieces of their story to create the desired end result.

director-writing is so common that i meet many, many writers who trap themselves in scenic prose because they assume that's what "good writing" is. these writers are not actually directors. they don't want to be standing behind the camera; they want to be in the mind of the characters. and those people are actor-writers.

an actor-writer's prose doesn't necessarily prioritize scenes one after the next, but develops a compelling narrative voice. actor-writing is about learning to be someone who isn't you. i think the moment you abandon the forced witness of the camera and instead dive into the mind, experiencing the story instead of rendering the story, you unlock the path of that complex emotional exploration you feel is missing in your work. and you will probably never go back.

here's an activity to try:

whatever you're working on right now, open a new doc, take your main character and, in your mind's eye, trap them in an interrogation room. sit them across from you. ask them, "what is your deal?" write down their answer.

in this activity, you're looking for a few things:

what is their story? why does it matter to them? (this is probably the biggest problem i have with the pitfalls of director-writing: nothing matters. everything is just...happening. as a reader, i'm always looking for what i'm being asked to love. maybe that love is awful, toxic, contradictory, ambivalent, whatever. the point is, it matters. a huge percentage of the things i read never ask me to love anything.)

are they trying to convince or persuade you of something, making their testimonial unreliable? or are they confessing to you things they'd never admit to anyone else?

what is at stake for them? what is their deepest desire and their greatest fear? in what way is their deepest desire flawed? how is their greatest fear irrational? how have the events of their story influenced or distorted their perception?

close narration offers us the greatest possible access to the interiority of the narrator. first person is really just a monologue, an explanation, an excuse, a confession, a plea, a prayer. so so so many writers get blocked because they're trying to See the story instead of Listen to it. they force themselves into this elastic third person where the reader remains a distant witness with the occasional thought, insight, or feeling, but that comes second to what i call Bodies in Space. if i never read another "he strode across the room" again it'll be too soon. imagery is wonderful, don't get me wrong, but i would always, always rather get insight into what a character is feeling, thinking, grieving, dreaming than the knowledge that they are sitting in a chair.

i'm not saying switch to first person. you can create the effect of first person with very close third, and you can create the effect of third person with very distant first. pronouns don't really matter. what's important is voice over vision.

i say this a lot, but if i want to watch a story, i'll turn on my tv. prose is the only art form that allows us to fully explore human consciousness. let it do the thing it was invented to do.

my theory of director-writers and actor-writers is adapted from Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction, in which he defines "picture" vs. "drama" writing. however i found that terminology confusing and poorly articulated, so i flipped it into a process-based approach with what i hope is more accessible phrasing. also, prose = consciousness is from 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley.

[faelapis]

replaying deltarune chapter ONE (1). so just to be clear, there are no new spoilers here, as i have not started chapters 3-4 yet -

i vaguely remember being somewhat bitter that the king was just "irredeemable." i think this was based mostly on fandom reactions, given that, at the time, we were in the heat of the "anti-redemption" movement: where the children yearned for complexity to be reduced to simple "let me kill bad people" morality.

anyway. i just wanted to say - i don't actually think that way about king anymore. not sure why i ever did. fandom discourse aside, he has pretty clear motivations that are not rooted in evil for evil's sake.

yes, he is mean. yes, he does the whole "pretending to be redeemed so the heroes have to face that they were too nice" trope (that i still dislike)... but it would be wrong to call him unmotivated.

really, all of this is pretty plainly stated, textually - his bitterness comes from abandonment. i'm not deep enough into deltarune lore to fully parse out what lightners and darkners represent... but a simple normie interpretation, it feels like lightners are the beings of the "real" world and darkners are either beings of imagination / fiction, or some other way tethered to lightners. they're created by them and given purpose by them.

and then when the lightners leave, the darkners have no purpose.

so really, this "purpose vs lack thereof" SHOULD have been a theme i picked up immediately, given that its a big one in steven universe and in my interpretation of those characters. this is also something that's thematically EVERYWHERE in deltarune. take anything from the jevil's imprisonment when he realized the fictional nature of his world, or ralsei only existing to be found by susie and kris. it feels like it's implied he's basically just been standing there, waiting to be found. because lightners give them purpose.

anyway, king is cool. idc anymore if he's "redeemable" or not. but i don't think that was ever the point. especially given how they immediately diffuse the seriousness of his evil by pointing out he wasn't actually going to kill his son in chapter 2 (and does seem to care). his bitterness towards lightners makes sense, and his yearning for new purpose is compelling. the "knight" representing some kind of "new hope" for darkners is also interesting. hope to see that aspect of lightners / darkners dynamic explored further in chapters 3 & 4.

[sanjarka]

Top 5 (or 10) things the books did better than the movies?

i am not the person you should be asking this. you have given me way to much power to shit on the movies. i already do that enough unprovoked.

if you love them please block my tag thg: movie criticism (or just block me😭). and trust me no one is happier than me if you enjoy them. i wish that i could too. but it's not happening.

THE BREAD SCENE - i know that time doesn't work the same way in a movie and in a book. i know that. but when a scene in a book is as well written as this one, as important as this one you can give it more than two fucking seconds. find a way for it work i literally don't care. that's your job. this is THE moment that established who katniss is/was who peeta/is was. their connection. asterid's mental health issues. and honestly maybe there is no way to do it justice in a movie format. BECAUSE IT SHOULD BE A SERIES. cause the timing would work so much better. you could basically do an entire episode with how detailed this scene is.

the seam/merchant divide in d12 - which is yet another thing the bread scene established that isn't just not done well but doesn't even exist in the movies. and that's not okay. suzanne plays it safe honestly by not explicitly stating that katniss is not white and i really dislike that. cause she can't be white and she isn't white. obviously this is a story set in future and race is a socially constructed thing. it changes with time. who knows what is going to be considered non white or white in the future. katniss or anyone really isn't even aware of race as a concept but that doesn't mean the effects of it don't exist. they just have a different name for it. the seam people work in the mines but merchants have shops. seam kids take out the tesserae and because of that are more likely to be reaped. i mean peeta's mom treatment of katniss in the bread scene *is* racism. and considering the american history and the fact that d12 is in appalachia katniss should be played by a native actress. then we have the coveys being obviously inspired by romani people. and the fact that after the "new" panem is established almost all of them are killed. it's a literal genocide. and while i really loved rachel zegler's portrayal of lucy gray she, and all the rest of the coveys, should've been played by romani people. it was the decent thing to do. and ignoring race in a story that is set in what is left of america feels wrong. is wrong.

katniss and peeta feeling like actual teenagers and being compelling as characters - they are immature and they're petty and they're impulsive and they are kids. katniss does try to appear and treat herself as an adult but she truly rarely succeeds. cuting out her crying after shooting the pig was so incredibly stupid. and i really dislike jennifer lawrence's performance. is it the script or the director or her i don't know but there isn't a single moment where i feel like i get katniss from her. the acting isn't bad it just isn't katniss. because katniss - she cries... a lot. she leans onto peeta... a lot. she's sensitive and soft inside. she's also often more vulnerable with him than he is with her. and it's the same shit with josh. his lines were so often changed into things peeta would never say and instead of a complex interesting kid we get that stalker from the cave. he doesn't get pissed on the roof, he doesn't get hurt on the train, we don't see him with a black eye after the bread scene. he doesn't throw a lamp and a statue when angry which isn't good but it opens up his relationship with anger. which is a very heartbreaking one. and then his hijacking looses its narrative value.

haymitch's alcoholism being treated as a joke most of time is awful. it's just so sanitized. any pain and trauma is. maybe i'm remembering it wrong but doesn't katniss trial last a day instead of weeks in the movies. the games are to clean as well. especially the aftermath of the first ones. it's not supposed to be pretty.

on the topic of the first games - katniss and peeta not being back to back and putting the berries in their mouth. i know people love him touching her braid but it's wrong. in the movie they are really amping up the difference between the two katniss is looking up and he's touching her but in the book they are a team. and they trust each other. they.are.back.to.back. AND PEETA IS THE ONE SAYING HOLD THEM OUT I WANT EVERYONE TO SEE. and just in general everlark's dynamic is awful and boring. they don't fight on the roof, they don't challenge each other, they're not kids playing catch with the force field, katniss doesn't fall in love with his eyelashes and peeta doesn't fall in a love with a song. not really. the magic is gone. the music is gone and i'm watching a soulless action movie. and i hate it.

[notebooks-and-laptops]

Why the Dragon King Sucks: an Exploration of What Makes a Good Villain and a satisfying Story Conclusion

Dragon Age as a franchise has some of my favourite villains, and also villains I think kinda suck. DATV is not immune to this; Ghilan'nain joins the ranks as one of my favourite villains of the series but there is one villain I can't stand. I get mad just thinking about him. And so I thought I'd share my thoughts.

So firstly, before we can unpack why a villian sucks, we must first unpack what makes a good villain. Contrary to popular belief I don't think a villain needs to be a fully dimensional person to be compelling, but I do think good villains generally fall into one of three categories:

Interesting because of the relationship to the hero/protagonist

Interesting because we understand their point, or because of moral complexity/ambiguity

Interesting because they're scary as all hell

Dragon age has dabbled in all of these types of villians.

The example of a villian who is interesting because of their relationship to the hero/protagonist is Danarius. Danarius is flat out evil with 0 redeeming qualities. His main motivation is to a) experiment on his slaves and b) recapture his favourite escaped slave. We know he regularly tortures and kills people. We don't even meet him until act 3! BUT his relationship to Fenris makes him work. He is everywhere in Fenris's narrative; from the house Fenris lives in, to the actions Fenris takes (he won't even be with you until hes dealt with Danarius), to the feeling that Fenris is being constantly hunted. Danarius is terrifying to Fenris, the things Fenris did FOR Danarius is terrifying to Fenris (killing the Fog Warriors), all of this makes both us AND Fenris angry. When he shows up he's menancing because he's been built up the WHOLE game. He works because of his relationship to Fenris.

Let's move onto a villian who is interesting due to their moral complexity. There were a few to pick from here, but I think ultimately I'm going to go with the Arishock (but shout outs in particular to Calpurnia, Zathrian, Illario and Isseya). The Arishock undoubtedly does some pretty evil stuff, and yet we UNDERSTAND him. He does not want to be in Kirkwall, yet he cannot leave until he gets what he needs. He wants to be peaceful, but is being pushed by the constant way that his people are being agitated; stolen from, blamed, tricked and manipulated by chantry zealots. He doesn't understand why kirkwall is allowed to function as it does when it leads to such misery/pain for everyone. He's very reasonable with a Hawke who is reasonable back and respects them. The thing that tips him over the edge is the fact that he's unwilling to hand over elves that the guards refused to bring justice for, and most people agree that the guards were in the wrong there. Nobody thinks the Arishock should have tried to take over Kirkwall, killing the Viscount and trying to take Isabela. But we UNDERSTAND why he might be doing what he's doing and THAT makes him compelling.

Final category; when a villain is scary. I think writers sometimes confuse this for the villain having a lot of power (*cough* Elganarn *cough*) but that's not what scary is. Scary is usually invoked by feeling that the hero/protagonist is under genuine threat if they were caught or feeling that this person will do fucked up things and has no line; even about people they care about. Absolute main dragon age villian to sit here is Branka who went so mad in her pursuit of the anvil she was willing to let her house be turned into Brood Mothers so they could pump out darkspawn who could test the traps. Ghilan'nain is also in this category.

To make an EXCELLENT villain you probably want to take a few strands from each collum; Loghain stands out here as someone who has a connection to our of our heros (Alistair's revenge quest) but also is morally understandable/interesting.

So now I've laid all that out...tell me. Where does the dragon king fit?

The dragon king doesn't really have a connection to Taash. They want Taashs blood sure but they only make two plays for Taash the whole game and Taash never seems scared of them. We don't find out why or what they want to do to Taash. Taash just. Doesn't know this guy. Like until the very end when he kills their mum, they don't have a reason to hate him.

The dragon king is not morally complex either. He is just. An evil guy working for an evil god who wants power. He's not got a particular point; he's not even like the red templars who at least had the motivation that the chantry had abandoned them and led them to be addicts for no reason. Theres no talk of that being the case with the antam. There is just. Nothing. He's some evil guy.

And finally, he's not scary. He's in fact so un-scary that our protagonists never ever get to fight him because he'd make a shit boss. I think this is a WILD choice. what I think happened was the Devs realised that as the other Taash quests had involved fighting dragons that should be their boss fight but like. What? I literally was so confused when this happened; I wondered if the dragon king could turn into a dragon for a moment or was riding the dragon but it's not that. We kill a dragon and don't even throw so much as a single spell or punch at the dragon king.

AND to make matters worse, we don't meet him until the very end and Taash doesn't really talk about him until then either. Varric narrator style mentions him and that's it. If you're not going to introduce your villian until late in the game you NEED to have build up like what we get for Denarias or Branka or Meredith. That's the whole issue with Corphyeus that everyone bangs on about; he's just not in the narrative enough to carry the feeling that he's an undefeatable big bad.

The dragon king is so boring. There's just. Nothing there. There's no relationship, there's no complexity. Just an evil guy.

And that makes me so annoyed considering that I love Taash and also that the voice acting when Taash's mum dies is so stunning. Taash deserved better than most of the plotlines they got, they deserved a better villian and they deserved choices beyond those that demonised multiculturalism. They don't even need a villain if you do their story right; many dragon age characters have no central villain and are still incredibly interesting: Sera, Blackwall, Vivienne, Cole, Wynne, Bull, Bethany, Carver, Sten to name just a few.

Tblr; the dragon king SUCKS

[lightningant]

Severus Snape thoughts

I've prodded him with my thoughts before but now I need to post through it. Because he's my princess.

I think a lot of what makes Snape so complex (and so compelling) is that he is neither a good person nor a just person. He really is beefing with that 11-year-old. He really did scoff at Albus saying that he would protect Harry because he cares about him. (LMAO, btw). He really is just a horrible guy, which honestly makes his efforts that much more brave and noble!

When we see the Prince's Tale, Severus Snape personally curates his timeline to showcase his bigotry to Harry. He specifically isolates moments where his antipathy for muggles is contrasted with his love for Lily. He does not show Harry his home life, or how much Lily liked him, he is on topic: I hated muggles, but I loved her. And then he isolates a moment where Lily finally explains how troubled she is by his friends, and he cuts off whatever teen drama motivated her to say it. He shows his worst memory again, something he was shaking with rage and fear at Harry discovering. He shows the aftermath of him grovelling.

And after that is the timeskip. His feelings are not relevant. In fact, all of his memories may as well be from Lily's perspective. It is significant that all his memories are essentially from Lily's perspective.

What Snape was showcasing to Harry is that he knows that he was not listening to her. He knows he was being patronizing, that he prioritized his exclusive access to her over feelings, that he treated her beliefs as if they were irrelevant or biased.

Snape took on a patron-like relationship with Lily, teaching her wizarding culture and presumably acting as the source of her incredible potions ability (despite her expertise clearly being charms). He most definitely assumed that in the Dark Lord's new order, people like Lily would be coveted for their magical skill alone, and he would not really care if the Death Eaters executed Lily's parents and sister because they're just muggles.

And then she is murdered for protecting Harry Potter too well. She is disposable. He had to have heard it. She's just a mudblood.

Snape gives himself no excuses in the Prince's Tale. He did not include what he did for her in his memories, because he prided himself in uplifting her star and probably still does, and the memories in that bottle exhibited his shame. He provides no context which might paint himself in a better light. He is giving Harry his remorse, with raw, open honesty. 'Here is where I went wrong.'

Snape's character is that of someone who is bearing the excruciating burden of not only being responsible for the death of a loved one, but silently de-radicalizing himself, all alone, while still on the inside. He lives in his muggle house. He intentionally repaired the link between his current self and his shameful muggle origins in order to acknowledge his values were wrong and the way he treated Lily was unforgivable. He won't even let paintings use slurs.

There is a temptation to polish his image, to say he was justified or uniquely victimized, without acknowledging Snape is messy and cruel has always been fundamentally incapable of empathy, yet he has passionate feelings on doing the right thing. He spent 10 years making an active choice to be a good person, a thing that does not come naturally to him. The point of the Prince's Tale is that it does not come naturally to him!!!!! And he does it anyway!!!!!!

He doesn't want Harry to die because he's the last thing he has left of Lily (🙄), but because the right thing to do, the Lily thing to do, is to not raise a boy for slaughter, let alone her boy.

[arrowheadedbitch]

Overview of the things I've decided are canon for my son of zeus au so far (hopefully I don't forget any):

The gods are dicks. They arent *always* dicks, but I don't want to sugarcoat them from their original myths, they do bad shit and often

Denki is favored by Apollo, Dionysus, and Hermes the most, Persephone also likes him pretty well

Zeus is Zeus, meaning who knows when he'll decide he loves his son or hates his son or just genuinely doesn't care, he's such a little hypocrite bitch ain't he

Quirks are the exact same as they are in canon, the presence of the Greek gods didn't affect that at all, the gods have nothing to do with quirks and while they still are probably banging like rabbits they aren't really that active in Japan so no, no one else at UA is a demigod

Zeus slept with Kaminari's mom because he was intrigued by a mortal with a power in his domain (electricity) that didn't come from him

Since Kaminari's powers come from both his quirk and his dad, there's some complexities to them

Kamimari was born with lightning powers but they worked differently before his quirk actually manifested (I'm toying with the idea that his quirk manifested while being smiled by Zeus with lightning? I haven't decided if I like that or not yet)

Kaminari doesn't want other people knowing he's a demigod for classic hero story reasons but also because 1. Greek gods being real is a secret and he ain't about to be the one that spilled it 2. It'd be really complicated and annoying to explain and let's be real, at least one person would come out of that thinking he went crazy

Athena doesn't like him because, well, dunceface, duh. She does appreciate his strategic abilities though

Ares also doesn't like him because he doesn't like killing people, Ares and Athena hate that they dislike the same kid so much that they'd consider changing their tune about him on just that alone

In junior high he went on a big quest, I haven't decided on any details of it, but it involved a lot of fighting way to strong people while way too young as most quests do, this is also how he got into Apollo, Hermes, Dio, and Persephone's (and by extention Hades since he loves Persephone enough to deal with anyone she likes) good graces, the quest was likely given by Zeus and likely involved Hera trying to kill him

He's not really surrounded by people in the ancient greek community, it's not like he has a camp half blood and even if he did he'd skip it to go to UA training anyway, but he is pretty well known in those circles post big quest

I'm toying with the idea that he failed his first quest and thus had to go on a redemption quest

Kaminari doesn't like being serious, but despite what his classmates and teachers think, he CAN do serious, how else would he be such a big shot in the Greek community?

Imma be real, there was probably some kind of war that Kaminari had to lead an army in or something. I'm sorry, child soldier stories just have so many layers to dissect it's not my fault that they're compelling in a way

My point is, serious Kaminari is like war general levels serious, but not even LOA attacks are bad enough to bring out serious kaminari, are you kidding, did you gloss over the part about god war? He's having a little trouble taking literally any threat at UA seriously and he'll have trouble taking almost every threat as a pro hero seriously, it's not his fault junior high set the bar way too high on what situations are serious!

One of Kaminari's demigod powers, as the son of Zeus, is that he can't take fall damage. No matter how high up he falls from, he will never ever get worse than a few scrapes

Pissing him off really badly makes the sky get stormy, I'm talking immediate clear skies to nothing but gray clouds moving in and you can't even SEE the sky anymore, also possibly rain, he doesn't do it often but he can and he'd probably be able to control it if he were to practice his demigod powers along with his quirk but we all know he ain't gonna do that any time soon

He can sword fight, he hopes this never comes up

He has to keep reminding Dionysus about the legal drinking age, Dionysus thinks it's stupid and therefore never listens, they have argued about it multiple times

Apollo and Kaminari play chess together on occasion

Hermes at one point gave Kami a special knife when he decided he liked him enough to give him a gift, it's a magic thief's blade which is just a dagger that cannot be found on his person no matter what you do. Pat him down? You won't feel it. Scan him? It didn't show. Metal detector? It didn't beep at all. But he can pull it out whenever. He won't but he does *have* it just in case. I'm also deciding if making it not be able to leave him would be too much. I don't want it to feel like a riptide ripoff, I'm thinking maybe it sprouts wings and flies to him?

Yes, I've just decided, the Thief's Knife will fly to him if left behind and can squeeze into any crack no matter how small to get to him

I'm shinkami trash so you KNOW shinkami is about to be canon in this au

In either 2A or 3A, Kaminari tells Shinsou his secret about the gods being real and him being Zeus' son, he spends a great amount of time explaining all the details to Shin and answering his questions, it's a lot

What can I say? Shinsou is gus confidant, he was gonna have to tell him at some point 🤷🏻‍♀️💅

He doesnt tell anyone else, but obv they've got to eventually find out somehow, what you think I'd just let it be lame?? Even after they find out, he won't tell them anything he doesn't have to, waits until it comes up to explain things, it's just too complicated he doesn't want to go through all that AGAIN and with twenty people this time

Oh and before you ask, I'm gonna say no on the flying thing. I know it could be a power of a Zeus kid, I know it could be cool, but no. No he cannot fly.

I can't think of anything else right now but I can't wait to wake up in a cold sweat tonight and realise what i forgot

Also, I'm gonna go ahead and tag @iys-cloud since I know iys really likes this au :]

[beevean]

Hey! Just wanna say I LOVED your short Tenna story. My characterization of him has been missing something for a while now, and you helped me realize what it was— he was WAY too nice. It’s difficult to balance a villain being manipulative and cruel yet tragic and sympathetic— and not only did you do it amazingly, you gave me a lot of confidence in trying my hand at it! Tenna and Kris make me oh so very ill and I’ve been wanting to write about them even before I watched the entirety of chapter three. Please keep writing if you so wish— it’s so good!

(also I loved reading your IDW Sonic deconstructions back in the day)

Awww thank you so muuuuuuch 🥺 I'm so happy that you sent me this ask!

I want to write something about Tenna, but I'm not really sure what (and ngl I'm intimidated by trying to imitate such an iconic character lol). My only thought was, I am in utter love with the Doom Board section, and how uncomfortable it is to witness Tenna's breakdown, and I felt the need to jot my interpretation down - my one mental image was Tenna noticing that Kris is not looking at him at all and feeling outright hurt at being ignored by his first watcher.

I think most fanworks nowadays paint Tenna too much as a lil flustered pathetic wet boy tragic babyboy bean. Which he is. But he's also a manipulative conman not above taking advantage of his employees, and a massive mood-swinging unhinged control freak not above hurting the kid he "raised" for the sake of soothing his own ego. I read a Japanese comment who called him a yandere, and yeah, that fits!

I think Tenna is the kind of person who does kind things for selfish reasons. His one desire is to feel loved and useful. The main way he has to get what he wants is to make people happy, so that they're drawn to him. This means that he's mostly a very nice person who genuinely enjoys entertaining others... but what he truly wants is the recognition that makes him feel worthy. And when he feels abandoned or shunned, when his Berserk Button over being called "old" (which to him means obsolete, worthless, to be thrown away) is hit, he grows desperate to prove himself, and starts putting himself above others, because he wants things his way, he needs to feel in control and in charge and like he matters.

But even he knows that force can only get him so far. If you keep playing his games in the Doom Board, eventually he gets to the point where he no longer believes you're honest. But he still won't let you go. That would be a defeat. The confirmation that you don't love him after all. And that would kill him inside. As Kris says if you CHECK him during the battle, despite his size, he's surprisingly quite fragile :)

One of Tenna's biggest strengths as a character is that he combines these villainous traits with not just a heartwrenching backstory that most of us can relate to, but a really lovable personality. Not only he's chipper and charming, but he really enjoys being a positive force in people's lives. The two sides don't cancel each other, but complement each other in a complex, compelling character, that personally I think it's almost unfair to reduce to the innocent sniffling babyboy lol

I guess this is the best advice I can give? Tenna is kind but self-centered. His ego is big but brittle, and inflated by making people happy. When angry, he gets high on his power and can get manipulative and violent, but deep down he's incredibly sad and doing the equivalent of saying "please tell me I'm good 🥺". It's like, he wants his audience to feel any emotion, even pain or sadness if it has to come to it. As long as he affects them.

Good luck with your writing! If you are posting it somewhere I'd be happy to check it out <3 I'm also so very normal about Tenna and Kris' relationship, I need all the "fun uncle shielding lil Kris from the Divorce and being hurt that his nibling has grown apart from him" content I can get my hands on <3

[ascendedrhyme]

I believe that teenagers, especially those in their first relationship, cannot truly have a healthy relationship. They're bound to figure things out as they go. Because it’s their first time, they don’t fully understand themselves, let alone someone else or the complexities of a relationship that demands commitment. How could they possibly create a "healthy" relationship under such circumstances?

So Hanako and Nene, a ship between a romance-obsessed girl and an attachment-deprived ghost? Them been healty sounds more unrealistic than the story’s entire premise.

But the fact that they’re so messy is what makes their romance so compelling. It’s relatable. Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun may be a story about ghosts and monsters, but like all great fantasy stories, it’s really just big metaphor for real life. At its core, it’s a story about growing up, falling in love, moving beyond your past, and facing an uncertain future.

Think about it—most teenagers enter their first romance knowing it won’t be their last, yet let this romance define their present while dreaming of the future. This story takes that idea to the extreme with two leads who are both destined to never reach adulthood, still enjoying the moment while trying to seize a happier futur for themself.

[ew01z]

weird i feel like some force is compelling me to ask,,, what are your thoughts on krisnix and langworth during the 7 year gap with endgame narumitsu ?? the masses need to know

something crazy is happening ...... apologising in advance cause i think about this sooo much but have never articulated any of my thoughts on it but THANK YOU FOR ASKING this lives in my mind rent free

BASICALLY between the original aa trilogy and phoenix being disbarred, we know miles goes travelling, canonically he is a prosecutor in several jurisdictions but because i'm self indulgent i think he also took up lecturing at universities (unrelated, this concept just itches my brain)

at this point in time he knows he's in love with phoenix and has been for a considerable amount of time HOWEVER. because he catastrophises everything, he absolutely would have convinced himself that either phoenix is straight (looks left looks right) or he doesn't deserve phoenix or both. in the midst of this hardcore yearning, he meets lang Often. lang, who is actively trying to get into miles' pants quite brazenly (although i imagine miles doesn't notice at first)

they end up having this weird fwb situation wherein they sleep together, probably go on dates that aren't dates (sometimes case related, sometimes not) and imo end up like way more soft and intimate than the original fwb arrangement. but because miles is still yearning like a motherfucker, he's extremely emotionally unavailable. which would be fine except lang has definitely at this point caught some feelings

i'm imagining angsty shit like lang trying to hold miles' hand while they walk somewhere and miles just Not having it. or like wanting to cuddle/spoon after sleeping together and miles is like Nope. but because miles has developed some degree of care for lang, he feels super guilty about it so now he's brooding Even More. that being said, they still keep hooking up as the rules of toxic yaoi would dictate

on the OTHER hand we have krisnix which i saw someone describe as psychosexual warfare and honestly i can't think of a better way to describe it. phoenix definitely knew something was up with kristoph almost immediately. the issue w this is that unfortunately kristoph is also sexy so this posed a problem.

phoenix, who was undoubtedly extremely in love with miles, who didn't know if he possibly could or would ever confess this (especially now that miles is prosecuting abroad), originally got involved with kristoph both like professionally and in a sexy way because he was extremely intrigued with kristoph's terrifying vibes.

phoenix gets disbarred, adopts trucy etc etc, but as we know phoenix keeps kristoph close in order to try stop him from Literally Killing People and because he knew kristoph had a hand in the forged evidence that got him disbarred. however this Also ends up slightly more intimate than anticipated. phoenix hates kristoph's guts and yet .. they have toothbrushes at each other's apartments?? know how each other like their eggs in the morning?? i imagine even though trucy is young and extremely perceptive, she was also somewhat won over by kristoph too. in short, waaaay too in each other's orbits for either of their likings.

while all this toxic yaoi is going on, miles and phoenix have kept in touch sporadically. miles offering to fly home in a heartbeat because he knows phoenix is innocent and phoenix having his weird complex about accepting help. not wanting to tell miles too much because he knows kristoph knows Everything.

however, miles flies phoenix (and trucy too sometimes) out to wherever he's based to try covertly prove phoenix's innocence by looking at the evidence again, other case documents etc. during this time, i think they realistically both realise they're in love with each other but ultimately can't act on it due to distance and the kristoph situation. it would be at this point that miles halts the fwb situation with lang (angst likely ensues, although i imagine lang saw it coming to some extent and knew miles was truly in love with phoenix). however it's more complicated for phoenix, who has to keep up the appearance of normality so kristoph doesn't suspect anything. the more emotional aspects of his relationship with kristoph like the toothbrushes in each others apartments etc etc stops and the fwb situation dies down, although its less eloquent and more messy than the langworth situation (which i imagine was more of an actual cut and dry breakup)

but eventually miles does come back to japanifornia and the events of aa4 take place. phoenix gets his badge back, gay kisses miles and realises that if shi long lang has no haters then he's dead. miles and phoenix are definitely both aware of the relationships the other had before they were together, however phoenix wright is jealous and a bitch so now he hates lang's guts despite having never met him.

the end!!!!! i'll honestly be really surprised if anyone reads this all as this was Very self indulgent. this is just how my head filled the blanks in canon in the messiest, gayest way possible and i'm so glad i had an excuse to post about it